Quotes About Fossils

Fossils were placed there by God to test our faith. - U.S. congressman Paul Broun

No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.

And then there are fossils. Whenever anybody tries to tell me that they believe the Earth was created in seven days, I reach for a fossil and go "Fossil!" And if they keep talking, I throw it just over their head.

And then there are fossils. Whenever anybody tries to tell me that they believe it took place in seven days, I reach for a fossil and go "fossil!" And if they keep talking I throw it just over their head.

Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs.

The Creation Museum uses fossils to present evidence that there was a global catastrophe, Noah's Flood, that killed and preserved the remains of creatures all over the earth.

In valley drift we meet commonly with the bones of quadrupeds which graze on plains bordering rivers.

The famous Java Homo erectus fossils prove that humans have occupied at least western Indonesia for a million years.

The first human ancestor to spread beyond Africa was Homo erectus, as is attested by fossils discovered on the Southeast Asian island of Java and conventionally known as Java man

This is not intended as a record or a chronicle, but the poetry of fossils, a reminiscence of the end of civilization. The dinosaurs left behind almost no trace of themselves. A few bones preserved in the amber, the contents of their stomachs, their waste. I only hope that we may leave behind something more than they did.

I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species… in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, radioactive at that.

Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.

The lowest and most level land areas show us, especially when we dig there to very great depths, nothing but horizontal layers of material more or less varied, which almost all contain innumerable products of the sea.

I can't think of any other region in the world which is such a vast source of fossils.

The more paleontological discoveries that are made, the more that we realize our knowledge of dinosaur types is fairly complete, and no ancestral forms ever will be found because they do not exist.

In an age of molecular genomics, it is ever more apparent that the fingerprints of evolution are pressed deeply into human DNA, just as they are into the genomes of every other organism. Biologists understand this, and so do students who study the science of life.

Through the study of fossils I had already been initiated into the mysteries of prehistoric creations.

Many scholars are not used to perceiving natural knowledge expressed in mythological language. If the study of fossils was not mentioned by Aristotle or Thucydides, and it wasn't, then it just didn't exist for many classicists and ancient historians.

La creencia de que existen los animales porque Dios los creó - y que los creó para que podamos responder mejor a nuestras necesidades - es contraria a nuestra comprensión científica de la evolución y, por supuesto, a los registros fósiles, que demuestran la existencia de primates no-humanos y otros animales millones de años antes de que hubiera seres humanos en absoluto».

We are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.

We are all potential fossils, still carrying within our bodies the crudites of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker.

Life is absurd; we must learn to enjoy the beautiful amber that coats the fossils of death strewn all around us.

Unfortunately, even big ideas leave no fossils for carbon dating

The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.