Fossils Quotations

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.

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.

Through the study of fossils I had already been initiated into the mysteries of prehistoric creations.

You see, the Greenhouse Effect is a direct result of burning fossil or old carbon fuels.

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.

There is hardly an activity that a person can think about that does not intrinsically involve energy, most of which is currently provided by fossil fuels.

We should be increasing research and development into our fossil fuel program.

When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.

The truth is, as most of us know, that global warming is real and humans are major contributors, mainly because we wastefully burn fossil fuels.

The sooner we get started with alternative energy sources and recognize that fossil fuels makes us less secure as a nation, and more dangerous as a planet, the better off we'll be.

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

The Creation Museum uses fossils to present evidence that there was a global catastrophe, Noah's Flood, that killed and preserved the remains of creatures all over the earth.

There is a reason it is called fossil fuel-it is an outdated method of getting power.

Most importantly, I agree that the truth of these matters should be determined by interpretation of scientific evidence - experiments, fossil studies and the like.

If you have a carbon cap and trade system, there'd be an agreed-to limit the amount of carbon we emit. That changes the economic picture for fossil technologies and for the renewable technologies. It makes the renewable technologies more attractive and the fossils less attractive.

For a time I didn't want to answer any questions about Queen. I'd like to be viewed as something alive and relevant, not some fossil.

A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil... not the cross.

So little of the anatomy is preserved that these fossils do not teach us much new about chimpanzee anatomical evolution. There is no logical necessity why chimps had to remain in the forest.

Searching for fossils also comes in many flavors, from microscopic siftings through tiny grains, to overland reconnaissance for suitable bedding settings to uncover bones,

Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of 'paleobabble' is going to change that.

On the contrary, there is a considerable body of evidence that these fossil traces, known as 'dino-fuzz', have nothing to do with bird feathers... I, and many others, do not find any credible evidence that those structures represent protofeathers.

Fossils have richer stories to tell - about the lub-dub of dinosaur life - than we have been willing to listen to.

Some of the fossils are up to 230 million years old with a total value of between four and five million dollars,

The truth is, natural organisms have managed to do everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet or mortgaging the future.

Society's dependence on fossil fuels is jeopardising social and economic progress.

When I was a kid the highlight of my week would be doing a fossil hunt at the local quarry... that kind of thing.

A pasty costly-made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied.

The high prices also highlight the fact that the U.S. is too heavily dependent on fossil fuels that we import from unstable parts of the world. To protect our national security, we must become more energy secure.

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free

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

Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.

There is so much being discovered about human origins. Five years ago, the oldest fossils of hominids were four and a half million years old. There has been a series of discoveries that pushed fossils back to six or seven million years old, which adds a couple of years to evolution history.

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

I must say that chimp fossils were about the last thing I would have expected to find there.

I flat out see no evidence for any fossils in our data. If a trilobite, for example, evolved on Mars and we came across a rock with it, we could resolve it.

Dating to just over four million years ago, the fossils represent unambiguous evidence for human evolution.

In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine.

highly unethical event that will only increase commercialization and encourage the theft of fossils from museums.

Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.

These fossils are things we predicted would be there but seriously in my lifetime I never thought we were going to find them.

The fact is fossil fuel carbon will stay in the surface climate system for millennia.

What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.

It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual completely continuous transitional sequences.

Every single record I have is a fossil.

This year - today - I am repenting of my dependence on fossil fuels.

They don't all look alike. There are some very different shapes, with implications of how these fossils walked.

The fossil fuel industry for too long has shifted enormous costs of carbon pollution onto the public.

For the first time, we found fossils that allow us to connect the first phase of human evolution and the second phase.

It is my object, in the following work, to travel over ground which has as yet been little explored and to make my reader acquainted with a species of Remains, which, though absolutely necessary for understanding the history of the globe, have been hitherto almost uniformly neglected.

It is to them [fossils] alone that we owe the commencement of even a Theory of the Earth ... By them we are enabled to ascertain, with the utmost certainty, that our earth has not always been covered over by the same external crust, because we are thoroughly assured that the organized bodies to which these fossil remains belong must have lived upon the surface before they came to be buried, as they now are, at a great depth.

Just 8% of the $409bn spent on fossil-fuel subsidies in 2010 went to the poorest 20% of the population.

There are enough fossils showing distinctive features to rule out the possibility these are unusual or aberrant modern humans

Wherever we look at the living biota … discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent…The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species usually appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediates.

Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.

In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.

Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.

To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love

We need to profoundly revise all of our taxes and charges. The aim is to tax pollution - notably fossil fuels - more, and tax work less

Any friend of fossil is a friend of mine. We've got to do everything we can to get people out of their automobiles and into mass transit.

Paleontologists ever since Darwin have been searching (largely in vain) for the sequences of insensibly graded series of fossils that would stand as examples of the sort of wholesale transformation of species that Darwin envisioned as the natural product of the evolutionary process. Few saw any reason to demur - though it is a startling fact that ...most species remain recognizably themselves, virtually unchanged throughout their occurrence in geological sediments of various ages.

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.

I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.

It is sunlight in modified form which turns all the windmills and water wheels and the machinery which they drive. It is the energy derived from coal and petroleum (fossil sunlight) which propels our steam and gas engines, our locomotives and automobiles. ... Food is simply sunlight in cold storage.

If somebody tries to tell me the earth was created in 7 days I take a fossil and say "FOSSIL". If he still won't shut up I throw it at him.

We have fossils... We win!

Here's what we should be doing. We've got to get off fossil fuels.

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.

We must rapidly wean ourselves off our dependence on coal and fossil fuels

I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus - living fossils - so we will never forget what these people stood for.

He's just rather more lively than most fossils.

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

When out fossil hunting, it is very easy to forget that rather than telling you how the creatures lived, the remains you find indicate only where they became fossilized.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

We are fossils in the making.

There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.

Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.

Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

It makes no sense to invest in [fossil fuel] companies that undermine our future

We can no longer continue feeding our addiction to fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow. For there will be no tomorrow.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, /where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

Burning fossil fuels is like breaking up the furniture to feed the fireplace because it's easier than going out to the woodpile.

Language is fossil Poetry.

Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.

I've never seen novels as built things. I have a tendency to see them as found things so that I always feel a little bit like an archaeologist who's working to get some fragile fossil out of the ground. And the more you get out unbroken, the better you succeed.