Quotes About Paleontology

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.

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

Skull of an early modern human, dating from 90,000 years ago, found at Qafzeh in Israel. Found at the same site were remains of Neandertals, suggesting that here at least the two species coexisted, possibly for thousands of years.

He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, "nipple-teeth").

Owen. He coined the term Dinosauria in 1841. It means 'terrible lizard' and was a curiously inapt name.

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.")

Trinil skullcap.

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

Jurassic refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland.

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

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

And long before the appearance of Archaeopteryx—whose scientific name means "first bird

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.

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.

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.

This absence of clear affinities has led an increasing number of paleontologists to reject ancestor-descendant relationships between all but (at most) a few of the Ediacaran and Cambrian fauna.

A PUZZLING PATTERN Over the years, as paleontologists have reflected on the overall pattern of the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record in light of Walcott's discoveries, they too have noted several features of the Cambrian explosion that are unexpected from a Darwinian point of view11 in particular: (1) the sudden appearance of Cambrian animal forms; (2)

Despite the scope of his synthesis, there was one set of facts that troubled Darwin—something he conceded his theory couldn't adequately explain, at least at present. Darwin was puzzled by a pattern in the fossil record that seemed to document the geologically sudden appearance of animal life in a remote period of geologic history, a period that at first was commonly called the Silurian, but later came to be known as the Cambrian.

FIGURE 2.8 According to Darwinian theory, the strata beneath the Cambrian rocks should evidence many ancestral and intermediate forms. Such forms have not been found for the vast majority of animal phyla. These anticipated but missing forms are represented by the gray circles. Lines and dark circles depict fossilized representatives of phyla that have been found.

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.

Genetic palaeontology brings clarity to a field of near-medieval confusion. The

I also discovered the only complete Brontosaurus skull.

Many dinosaurs were smaller than chickens.