Quotes About Fossils

1840s, when Richard Owen first described giant bones in England, he named them Dinosauria: terrible lizards.

A sign that read WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH dangled from one hinge

The Indians think these fossils are the bones of serpents, which is to say reptiles. We think they were reptiles, too. They think these creatures were gigantic. So do we. They think these gigantic reptiles lived in the distant past. So do we. They think the Great Spirit killed them. We say we don't know why they disappeared—but since we offer no explanation of our own, how can we be sure theirs is superstition?

Lucy brought with her an image of our human ancestors that you don't get when you find a jaw or an arm bone or a leg bone. Here was 40 percent of a single skeleton.

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.

99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.

Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.

Whatever the actual total, 99.99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.

Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister "She sells seashells on the seashore.")

So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of palaeontology than Mary Anning

At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn't even actually known that she was a female.

assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I

He's just rather more lively than most fossils.

Memories are fossils, the bones left by dead versions of ourselves.

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be. The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.

There's an incomparable rush that comes from finding dinosaur bones. You know you're the first person to lay hands on a critter that lived 80 or 90 million years ago.

There's this shop in New York I go to; it has bones and fossils and insects that are like works of art. I have a few on my wall.

Darwin's picture of the history of life "contradict[ed] what the animal forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth tell us of their own introduction and succession upon the surface of the globe.

Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals.

It was these strata that Sedgwick named after a Latinized English term for the country of Wales—"Cambria," a designation that eventually replaced "Silurian" as the name for the earliest strata of animal fossils.

contents of the guts of several animals.46 The discoveries near Chengjiang demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that sedimentary rocks can preserve soft-bodied fossils of great antiquity and in exquisite detail, thereby challenging the idea that the absence of Precambrian ancestors

In other words, they have failed to find the paleontological equivalent of the numerous finely graded intermediate colors (Pendleton blue, dusty rose, gun barrel gray, magenta, etc.) that interior designers covet.

As Chen explained, the Chinese fossils turn Darwin's tree of life "upside down.