20th-century Paleontologist Quotes

Alfred Romer
Robert T. Bakker
Edwin H. Colbert
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Jack Horner (paleontologist)
Neil Shubin
Henry Gee

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

Alfred Romer
Alfred Romer
Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else.

Dinosaurs, more than any other creatures of the past have a popular image. Museum visitors flock to the dinosaur exhibits, whether to get factual information about them, to try to visualize what life was like when these monsters existed in the flesh, or just to wonder at their odd and outlandish shapes.

Tyrannosaurus was truly the Schwarzenegger of dinosaurs.

The naive assumption that shells are acquired because they protect soft bodies seems influenced by anthropocentric thinking: man uses shields for protection from aggressors.

The past is mysterious, ever so the farther we look back from our vantage point in the twentieth-century world. As we follow the procession of the year back through time the earth and its inhabitants seem to us less real and less substantial the more distantly they are removed from this age in which we live.

Edwin H. Colbert
Edwin H. Colbert
We would never have scales, feathers, or breasts if we didn't have teeth in the first place.

Neil Shubin
Neil Shubin
Physics, chemistry, astrophysics are obviously the ideal field for the tidy mind...in the biological and geological sciences the tidy mind often goes astray and the passive, unmathematical approach may me more suitable.

The geologist strides across the landscape to get the big picture, but the paleontologist stays at one spot or shuffles along looking at the ground for his pet objects.

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 of the Earth, however, tells a very different story.

Perhaps the only thing that saves science from invalid conventional wisdom that becomes effectively permanent is the presence of mavericks in every generation - people who keep challenging convention and thinking up new ideas for the sheer hell of it or from an innate contrariness.

Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being.

Henry Gee
Henry Gee
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 (paleontologist)
Jack Horner (paleontologist)
Really the best way to understand anything about dinosaurs is by looking at living animals. You look at birds and then look at the closest living ancestor of birds, which is the crocodile. If you look at characteristics that birds and crocodiles have in common, the explanation is that the trait was in the common ancestor that birds and crocodiles had at one time.

It is the large brain capacity which allows man to live as a human being, enjoy taxes, canned salmon, television, and the atomic bomb.

Evolution has no purpose; man must supply this for himself.

Paleontology is a very visual inquiry.... All paleontologists scribble on napkins at coffee breaks, making sketches to explain their thinking.

Robert T. Bakker
Robert T. Bakker
I'm not sure if erotica should be angry and grim and terrifying and bitter, but it works for me. I rode my frustration. I kicked the bitch in the ribs until it spat up what I needed.

Caitlín R. Kiernan
Caitlín R. Kiernan