#fossils

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

— Richard Leakey

#fossils #i #other #region #source

To investigate the history of man's development, the most important finds are, of course, hominid fossils. ↗

— Richard Leakey

#development #finds #fossils #history #hominid

When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit. ↗

— Donald Johanson

#africa #anthropology #around #began #biology

Oaths are the fossils of piety. ↗

— George Santayana

#oaths #piety

The phrase 'the fossil record' sounds impressive and authoritative. As used by some persons it becomes, as intended, intimidating, taking on the aura of esoteric truth as expounded by an elite class of specialists. But what is it, really, this fossil record? Only data in search of interpretation. All claims to the contrary that I know, and I know of several, are so much superstition. ↗

— Gareth J. Nelson

#darwin #darwinism #evolution #fossil-record #fossils

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. ↗

— Henry Gee

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions #evolution

Certainly paleontologists have found samples of an extremely small fraction, only, of the earth's extinct species, and even for groups that are most readily preserved and found as fossils they can never expect to find more than a fraction. ↗

— George G. Simpson

#earth #even #expect #extinct #extremely

Rocks are not static and inert. They are constantly changing, shifting, and rearranging their form and location. They can be melted, deposited, eroded and squeezed into new forms... They offer clues about the shifting, changing nature of the continents, mountain ranges, oceans and islands... When an animal or plant dies and its remains leave an impression in rock, the resulting fossil is a testament to life's history and its changing, evolving nature... Explore the fossils life has left as clues to its evolution. ↗

— Robert R. Coenraads

#change

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. ↗

— Jack Horner

#earth #fossils #geology #paleontology #nature

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe. ↗

— Georges Cuvier

#alone #anyone #birth #dreamed #earth