Quotes About Fossils

Then he took me to look at the Maastricht animal, still today one of the world's most famous fossils. (Though the Netherlands has repeatedly asked for it back, the French have held on to it for more than two hundred years.)

We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much... We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time.

Dinosaurs are the best way to teach kids, and adults, the immensity of geologic time.

The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted—a place among the fossils.

The dinosaur is for most people the epitome of extinctness, the prototype of an animal so maladapted to a changing environment that it dies out, leaving fossils but no descendants.

Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.' 'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals—mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.

Did you know that the Stegosaurus lived further away from the Tyrannosaurus Rex than we are from the Tyrannosaurus Rex in time?

You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.

The fossils were sublime, but I found as much fascination in the odd paraphernalia of culture that, for various reasons, end up in museum drawers. Late eighteenth century apothecary boxes, thread cases from the mills of Lawrence, Victorian cigar boxes of gaudy Cuban design - all the better to house fossils.

When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.

You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.

One should not forget that there are very few surviving items from this period, often just single, small bones, a tooth, a sliver of the skull. Categorizing these pieces can be very difficult.

Dinosaurs are real popular right now.

Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.

I was very fortunate, during my early years as a paleontologist, in that my field crews and I made some remarkable discoveries indicating dinosaurs to have been extremely social.

Habían llegado a una cueva. Tras los primeros sondeos, la arenisca había dado paso a una vena caliza comanchiense llena de diminutos fósiles de cefalópodos, corales, equinoideos y spirifera, con indicios ocasionales de esponjas silíceas y huesos de vertebrados marinos —probablemente de teleósteos, tiburones y ganoideos—

Lexington, met the man who would inspire four long years of unrequited love on her part, she was thinking about fossils. She didn't have any

My father's theory… was defined by a hasty press as being this—that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity.

What I am teaching is religiousness, a quality. Religion is a dead dogma, fixed principles, frozen fossils. What I am teaching to you is a living, flowing religiousness - an experience like love.

Never since we discovered there were dinosaurs did anyone get sick of them.

En la imagen del árbol de la vida que tenía en su mente Darwin hay también mucha muerte. Un gran número de hojas secas yacen en el suelo, bajo la verde copa. Corresponden a los organismos desaparecidos que solo nos son conocidos por los fósiles, las hojas marchitas que en su día brillaron al sol.

Fossil remains attest to the presence of prehistoric protohorses on the North American prairie until the end of the Pleistocene epoch, 10,000 years ago. The earliest of these animals had toes instead of hooves and were the size of foxes.

All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.

Hammond turned to Gennaro. You know, of course, what Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler do. They are paleontologists. They dig up dinosaurs. And then he began to laugh, as if he found the idea very funny.