Paleontology Quotes

“But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

“The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it”
― Charles Dickens, All the Year Round: Contributions

“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, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life

“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

“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

“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, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever

“Fossils do not require long ages to form. In fact, they must form quickly, otherwise the organism’s softer tissues and even bones suffer decay (shells or teeth enamel naturally take longer to disintegrate).”
― Ken Ham, A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter

“In time, extinction comes for all species. Some leave descendants. Others do not. Beautiful as the image is, there is no tree of life. The shape of biodiversity is more like a chaotic blanket, individual threads splitting, being snipped off, branching again, creating an incredible tangle of species that are both discrete and connected. All the species alive in this moment, at the dawn of the Paleogene, will eventually perish. But some will sprout populations a little different from their point of origin, variations that will survive even as their parent species disappear, and with them the same ecological dance will begin again. The species that exist today will shape what tomorrow looks like, life itself driving the profusion of so many unique forms.”
― Riley Black, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World

“Turning hard material (e.g., bones) into fossils is easy in a lab setting, but in 1993, scientists were even able to make fossils from soft animal tissues! New York Times’ Science Watch reports: Scientists have for the first time produced fossils of soft animal tissues in a laboratory. In the process they discovered that most of the phosphate required for the fossilization of small animal carcasses comes from within the animal itself.”
― Ken Ham, A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter

“Gathering can be just as critical as hunting because men sometimes return with nothing, in which case the family must rely entirely on gathered foods.”
― Richard W. Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

“Bend your wrist back and forth. Open and close your hand. When you do this, you are using joints that first appeared in the fins of fish like Tiktaalik. Earlier, these joints did not exist. Later, we find them in limbs.”
― Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

“La paléontologie ne ranime pas seulement des mémoires effacées par la mort, elle invite à penser l'ordre du monde. Lequel dérange par l'absence de détermination finale.”
― Jean Le Loeuff, Dans la peau d'un dinosaure

“The innate propensity to look for and impose structure is revealed as a prominent feature of our species both by archaeology and in extant hunter-gatherer societies.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“The Great Hall of Dinosaurs at Yale's Peabody Museum may not bill itself as a place of spiritual pilgrimage, but that's sure what it feels like to me.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

“Peut-être y a-t-il dans l'étude du vieux et des morts quelque chose qui maintient jeune et vivant.”
― David Bainbridge, Paleontology: An Illustrated History

“Their synchrotron, a super-powerful x-ray machine, can harness the radiation of überfast subatomic particles in order to -- among many other things -- look inside solid objects. It's spectacular science, but sometimes I prefer not to think about all that energy and chaos around my precious findings.”
― Lee Berger, Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins

“By almost any definition, Homo naledi is not human. But if the present archaeological record reflects the complexity of Homo sapiens accurately, it means that naledi was significantly more complex than sapiens at the time.”
― Lee Berger, Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins

“Protein is more stable than DNA over time, and so this new technology offers a fresh way to study fossils.”
― Lee Berger, Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins

“Many a dinosaur was probably swept away by floodwaters or entombed by mud avalanches. But the megamonsoons also had another effect. They helped divide Pangea into environmental provinces, characterized by different amounts of precipitation, varying severity of the monsoonal winds, and different temperatures. The equatorial region was extremely hot and humid, a tropical hell that would make summer in today’s Amazon seem a trip to Santa’s workshop by comparison. Then there were vast stretches of desert, extending about 30 degrees of latitude on either side of the equator—like the Sahara, only covering a much broader swath of the planet. Temperatures here were well into the hundreds (over 35 degrees Celsius), probably all year long, and the monsoonal rains that pounded other parts of Pangea were absent here, offering little more than a trickle of precipitation. But the monsoons exerted a great impact in the midlatitudes. These areas were slightly cooler but much more wet and humid than the deserts, far more hospitable to life. Herrerasaurus, Eoraptor, and the other Ischigualasto dinosaurs lived in such a setting, smack in the middle of the midlatitude humid belt of southern Pangea.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Age of Dinosaurs: The Rise and Fall of the World’s Most Remarkable Animals

“Pangea may have been a united landmass, but its treacherous weather and extreme climates gave it a dangerous unpredictability. It wouldn’t have been a particularly safe or pleasant place to call home. But the very first dinosaurs had no choice. They entered a world still recovering from the terrible mass extinction at the end of the Permian, a land subject to the violent whims of storms and the blight of blistering temperatures. So did many other new types of plants and animals that were getting their start after the mass extinction cleared the planet. All of these newbies were thrust onto an evolutionary battlefield. It was far from certain that dinosaurs were going to emerge triumphant. After all, they were small and meek creatures, nowhere near the top of the food chain during their earliest years. They were hanging around with lots of other species of small-to-midsize reptiles, early mammals, and amphibians in the middle of the food pyramid, fearful of the crocodile-line archosaurs, who held the throne. Nothing was handed to the dinosaurs. They were going to have to earn it.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“The initial eruptions in Morocco released clouds of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, which rapidly warmed the planet. It got so hot that strange ice formations buried within the seafloor, called clathrates, melted in unison all throughout the world’s oceans. Clathrates are unlike the solid blocks of ice we’re used to, the ones we put in our drinks or carve into fancy sculptures at parties. They are a more porous substance, a latticework of frozen water molecules that can trap other substances inside it. One of those substances is methane, a gas that seeps up constantly from the deep Earth and infiltrates the oceans but is caged in the clathrates before it can leak into the atmosphere. Methane is nasty: it’s an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, packing an earth-warming punch over thirty-five times as great. So when that first torrent of volcanic carbon dioxide increased global temperatures and melted the clathrates, all of that once-trapped methane was suddenly released. This initiated a runaway train of global warming. The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere approximately tripled within a few tens of thousands of years, and temperatures increased by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“After some of the largest volcanic eruptions in Earth history desecrated ecosystems, dinosaurs became more diverse, more abundant, and larger. Completely new dinosaur species were evolving and spreading into new environments, while other groups of animals went extinct. As the world was going to hell, dinosaurs were thriving, somehow taking advantage of the chaos around them.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“THE JURASSIC PERIOD marks the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs proper. Yes, the first true dinosaurs entered the scene at least 30 million years before the Jurassic began. But as we’ve seen, these earlier Triassic dinosaurs had not even a remote claim to being dominant. Then Pangea began to split, and the dinosaurs emerged from the ashes and found themselves with a new, much emptier world, which they proceeded to conquer. Over the first few tens of millions of years of the Jurassic, dinosaurs diversified into a dizzying array of new species. Entirely new subgroups originated, some of which would persist for another 130-plus million years. They got larger and spread around the globe, colonizing humid areas, deserts, and everything in between. By the middle part of the Jurassic, the major types of dinosaurs could be found all over the world. That quintessential image, so often repeated in museum exhibits and kids’ books, was real life: dinosaurs thundering across the land, at the top of the food chain, ferocious meat-eaters comingling with long-necked giants and armored and plated plant-eaters, the little mammals and lizards and frogs and other non-dinosaurs cowering in fear.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“The holes in front of us were fossilized tracks, huge ones. Dinosaur tracks, no doubt. As we looked closer, we could see that there were both handprints and footprints, and some of them had finger and toe marks. They had the telltale shape of tracks left by sauropods. We had found a 170-million-year-old dinosaur dance floor, records left by colossal sauropods that were about fifty feet long and weighed as much as three elephants.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“These are feathers. Not the quill-pen feathers that make up the wings of today’s birds but simpler ones that look more like strands of hair. These were the ancestral structures that bird feathers evolved from, and it is now known that many (and perhaps all) dinosaurs had them. Yutyrannus and Dilong establish beyond a doubt that tyrannosaurs were among these feathered dinosaurs. Unlike birds, tyrannosaurs certainly were not flying. Instead, they probably used their feathers for display or to keep warm. And because both a large tyrannosaur like Yutyrannus and a small tyrannosaur like Dilong have feathers, this implies that the common ancestor of all tyrannosaurs had feathers, and therefore that the great T. rex itself was most likely feathered, too.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“there is no denying that by the dawn of the Campanian subinterval of the latest Cretaceous, beginning about 84 million years ago, tyrannosaurs had risen to the top of the food pyramid.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“During the final 20 million years of the Cretaceous, tyrannosaurs flourished, ruling the river valleys, lakeshores, floodplains, forests, and deserts of North America and Asia. There is no mistaking their signature look: huge head, athletic body, sad arms, muscular legs, long tail. They bit so hard that they crunched through the bones of their prey; they grew so fast that they put on about five pounds every day during their teenage years; and they lived so hard that we have yet to find an individual that was more than thirty years old when it died. And they were impressively diverse: we have found nearly twenty species of these big-boned tyrannosaurs from the latest Cretaceous, and there are surely many more out there waiting to be discovered. The Pinocchio-nosed Qianzhousaurus, so fortuitously discovered by that still-anonymous backhoe operator at the Chinese construction site, is one of the latest examples. Just as Brown and Osborn grasped over a hundred years ago, when they were the first humans to set eyes on a tyrannosaur, T. rex and its brethren really were the kings of the dinosaur world.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“It goes without saying, but T. rex was huge: adults were about forty-two feet (thirteen meters) long and weighed in the ballpark of seven or eight tons, based on those equations from a few chapters ago, which calculate body weight from the thickness of the thighbone. These proportions are off the charts for carnivorous dinosaurs. The rulers of the Jurassic—the Butcher Allosaurus, Torvosaurus, and their kin—got up to about thirty-three feet (ten meters) long and a few tons—monsters to be sure, but they had nothing on Rex. After temperature and sea-level changes ushered in the Cretaceous, some of the carcharodontosaurs from Africa and South America got even bigger than their Jurassic predecessors. Giganotosaurus, for example, was about as long as T. rex and may have reached about six tons. But that’s still a good ton or two lighter than Rex, so the King stands alone as the biggest purely meat-eating animal that lived on land during the time of dinosaurs, or indeed at any time in the history of our planet.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“Natural selection doesn't plan for the future, it only works in the present, to adapt organisms to their immediate circumstances.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

“Without the more developed sense of history that only fully flourished in modernity - reflected in the notion of a future potentially utterly unlike the past - there is no room for thinking of perils or promises that outstrip present and past experience.”
― Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction