Fossil Record Quotes

#1. The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)

Carl Sagan

#2. If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range ...

Stephen Jay Gould

#3. Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.

Niles Eldredge

#4. There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead. No paleontologist..denies that this is so. It is simply a fact, Darwin's theory and the fossil record are in conflict.

David Berlinski

#5. A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

Francis Crick

#6. Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life's life-story.

Michael Martone

#7. Established species are evolving so slowly that major transitions between genera and higher taxa must be occurring within small rapidly evolving populations that leave NO LEGIBLE FOSSIL RECORD.

Steven M. Stanley

#8. Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.

Francis Collins

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

Jack Horner

#10. Sometime in the first billion years, life appeared on the earth's surface. Slowly, the fossil record indicates, living organisms climbed the ladder from simple to more advanced forms.

Robert Jastrow

#11. The boy who was taken," she said. "Is he your son?"
"How old do you think I am, Dweller?"
"I'm a little shaky on the fossil record, but I'd say fifty to sixty thousand years."
"Eighteen. And no. He's not my son.

Veronica Rossi

#12. Having to accept hominoids as real will require having to acknowledge that the prehuman fossil record is comprised entirely of their bones, rather than ours.

Lloyd Pye

#13. As you know, the fossil record includes not only the ancestors of crocodiles and whales, but also the ancestors of human beings. And this, of course, is why evolution remains controversial.

Kenneth R. Miller

#14. We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution

Richard Dawkins

#15. The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.

Gareth J. Nelson

#16. The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.

Soren Kierkegaard

#17. The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.

Stephen Jay Gould

#18. On a perfect planet such as might be acceptable to a physicist, one might predict that from its origin the diversity of life would grow exponentially until the carrying capacity, however defined, was reached. The fossil record on Earth, however, tells a very different story.

Simon Conway Morris

#19. Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ...

Stephen Jay Gould

#20. Palaeontologists cannot live by uniformitarianism alone. This may be termed the Phenomenon of the Fallibility of the Fossil Record.

D. V. Ager

#21. The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution i.e., a species becoming a new species accomplishing a major morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.

Steven M. Stanley

#22. But I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation.

E.J.H. Corner

#23. Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#24. The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms.

Robert Jastrow

#25. They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines.

Kurt Vonnegut

#26. What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite.

Louise Leakey

#27. The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast - above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill - has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.

David Quammen

#28. Every single record I have is a fossil.

Henry Rollins

#29. The entire evolutionary record on our planet, particularly the record contained in fossil endocasts, illustrates a progressive tendency toward intelligence. There is nothing mysterious about this:
smart organisms by and large survive better and leave more offspring than stupid ones.

Carl Sagan

#30. Protectionist politicians cannot stand the notion of a fossil-fuel-rich America maintaining record levels of production through exports.

Mike Pompeo

#31. It is a fact that, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution. It is a fact that we are already dealing with the catastrophe of climate change in places like California, where people have been burnt out of their homes and where they are dealing with record droughts.

Mark Ruffalo

#32. Fossils work almost the same way as photography as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography.

Hiroshi Sugimoto