American Paleontologist Quotes

Henry Fairfield Osborn

Othniel Charles Marsh

Charles Doolittle Walcott

Alfred Romer

Robert T. Bakker

Nathaniel Shaler

Edwin H. Colbert

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

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

Robert T. Bakker

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

George Gaylord Simpson

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.

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)

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.

It is certainly within the domain of science to determine when the earth was first fitted to receive life, and in what form the earliest life began. To trace that life in its manifold changes through past ages to the present is a more difficult task, but one from which modern science does not shrink.

Othniel Charles Marsh

The hunter of wild game is always bringing live animals nearer to death and extinction, whereas the fossil hunter is always seeking to bring extinct animals to life.

Henry Fairfield Osborn

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

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.

Ellis Leon Yochelson

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

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

It has been well observed that the imagination of man does not really enable him to create anything new, but only to recombine or rearrange what he has seen.

William Diller Matthew

The greater part of the facts [with] which geologists have to deal possess for the general public a recondite character. They concern things which are not within the limits of familiar experience. In treating of them, the science uses a language of its own, an argot as special as that of the anatomist or the metaphysician.

Nathaniel Shaler

The worst problem in the search for the oldest animal fossils is mistaken identity.

Nature has a habit of placing some of her most attractive treasures in places where it is difficult to locate and obtain them.

Charles Doolittle Walcott