Quotes About Paleontology

We have fossils... We win!

Why, then, did it disappear 45,000 years ago? Of course, if diprotodons had been the only large animal to disappear at this time, it might have been just a fluke. But more than 90 percent of Australia's megafauna disappeared along with the diprotodon

Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago. The

We dig up dinosaurs to try and figure out what happened to them. Perhaps someday dinosaurs, in the form of corvids, will dig us up to figure out what happened to us.

I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I've always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings.

The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.

Bones and rocks are eloquent storytellers, if you know how to listen to them.

The search for historical laws is, I maintain, mistaken in principle.

In vertebrate paleontology, increasing knowledge leads to triumphant loss of clarity.

Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.

Now, evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen.

To probe our past beyond afarensis was to fall into a wormhole— and emerge on the other side 9 million years earlier, in the Miocene epoch.

Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you don't see any dinosaurs.

If my career doesn't work out as a violinist, I want to become an archaeologist. I've read about paleontology, too - that's dinosaur bones - but I thought it would be more interesting to do archaeology.

I've always loved dinosaurs.

I grew up loving dinosaurs, digging up things.

I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a palaeontologist. I wanted to dig up dinosaurs.

When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Boelsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx.

The appearance of the bones of quadrupeds, especially those of complete bodies in the strata, tells us either that the layer itself which carries them was in earlier times dry land or that dry land was at least formed in the immediate area.

I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal.

Now, evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen.

No amount of study of present forms [of life] would permit us to infer [the existence of] dinosaurs

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.