Quotes About Paleontology

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

Soren Kierkegaard

#2. The impact of the magazine was very strong. As I said, it portrayed dinosaurs as part of the geological history, part of the story of life on earth. It struck that paleontology was the career for me.

Robert T. Bakker

#3. A worldwide flood destroyed all life on earth about five thousand years ago requires denying an immense amount of generally accepted knowledge - from astronomy, physics, geology, paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, cave paintings, and more.

Marcus J. Borg

#4. 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.

Daniel Dennett

#5. This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#6. One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.

John Steinbeck

#7. Darwin recognized the fact that paleontology then seemed to provide evidence against rather for evolution in general or the gradual origin of taxonomic categories in particular.

George Gaylord Simpson

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

Stephen Jay Gould

#9. We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.

Michael Shermer

#10. 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.

Kathryn Lasky

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

Alfred Romer

#12. My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.

Stephen Jay Gould

#13. In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.

Jack Horner

#14. I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology).

Stephen Jay Gould

#15. Human paleontology shares a peculiar trait with such disparate subjects as theology and extraterrestrial biology: it contains more practitioners than objects for study.

David Pilbeam

#16. The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

John Updike

#17. 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

#18. Full of troubles, the mind is still the only Garden of Delight.

Mason Cooley

#19. The fear of being ridiculed is gruesome than death.

Aniruddha Sastikar

#20. 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

#21. The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it

Charles Dickens

#22. I wanted to be an elementary school teacher my whole life.

Steve Wozniak

#23. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

Stephen Jay Gould

#24. What I allow into my head finds its way to my heart, which is a porthole to my soul. Therefore, I might be wise to consider the state of my soul, and then walk this process backwards.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#25. 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

#26. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#27. I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue.

Richard E. Leakey

#28. I like music a lot.

Usain Bolt

#29. Sometimes I make more money in a weekend than my grandpa made in a year.

Diplo

#30. I'm pretty much of a physical actor.

Nick Nolte