Quotes About Natural history

One reason life took so long to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading.

Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions - the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago. And humans may have been partly to blame for many of those changes in nature, too.

The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.

No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time.

Agassiz concluded that the fossil record, particularly the record of the explosion of Cambrian animal life, posed an insuperable difficulty for Darwin's theory

I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.

What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. Karl Marx may have gotten in backward when he called religion the opiate of the people.

Artificial selection has become a much more important chapter in natural history as it has moved into the space once ruled exclusively by natural selection.

keep coming back to that image of John Chapman floating down the Ohio River, snoozing alongside his mountain of apple seeds—seeds that held sleeping within them the apple's American future, the golden age to come. The barefoot crank knew something about how things stand between us and the plants, something we seem to have lost sight of in the two centuries since. He understood, I think, that our destinies on the river of natural history are twined.

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled; but this morbid fear must not lead us to conceal the facts and so to falsify the whole of human history -- which is of course part of natural history -- and pass it on in falsified form just because it is customary to do so, when we know that all history is falsified and always transmitted in falsified form.

Whereas in its developments up to the present psychology has dealt chiefly with psychic processes in the light of physical causation, the future task of psychology will be the investigation of their spiritual determinants. But the natural history of the mind is no further advanced today than was natural science in the thirteenth century. We have only begun to take scientific note of our spiritual experiences.

War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.

Even the earliest cave paintings in France and Spain had natural motion.

Although the hill is not high enough to enable one to see Nantucket in its entirety, Altar Rock is the best seat in the house when it comes to imagining how the island originally came into being. Between 22,000 and 16,000 years ago, a giant glacier stretching across what is now Nantucket Sound bulldozed Saul's Hills into a rough approximation of their present form. This is where the icy shovel of the bulldozer stopped, dumping the boulder we see beside us.

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

The natural history of this archipelago is very remarkable; it seems to be a little world within itself.

There is nothing like geology; the pleasure of the first day's partridge shooting or first day's hunting cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue. Charles Darwin, letter to his sister Catherine, 1834

But Geology carries the day: it is like the pleasure of gambling, speculating, on first arriving, what the rocks may be; I often mentally cry out 3 to 1 Tertiary against primitive; but the latter have hitherto won all the bets.

I am Elizabeth Philpot, I declard, and I collect fossil fish.

It was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic account of the natural history of the island

I went to my first dinosaur hall with my father and twin brother. We went to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was blown away by the dinosaurs.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.