Paleontologist Quotes

Nicolas Steno

Marie Stopes

Henry Fairfield Osborn

Othniel Charles Marsh

Charles Doolittle Walcott

Alfred Romer

Robert T. Bakker

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

Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald

It does not come within the domain of geology to investigate the origin of the universe and of solar and planetary systems. Yet such investigations are so closely associated with the origin and earliest history of the earth that the results attained by astronomical researches have at all times exerted an influence upon the views of geologists.

Karl Alfred Ritter von Zittel

The disease, respecting which the present inquiry is made, is of a nature highly afflictive... The unhappy sufferer has considered it as an evil, from the domination of which he had not prospect of escape.

James Parkinson

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

Colin Patterson (biologist)

The great problem of the whence and whither of man has been before the minds of thinkers from time immemorial. This has, of course, also extended to questions concerning animal and plant origins and that of the world and of the universe itself. These questions, after centuries of thought, are still far from their ultimate solution.

Richard Swann Lull

Tyrannosaurus was truly the Schwarzenegger of dinosaurs.

Kenneth Carpenter

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

Comets are facts of observation; there is no mistake as to the real existence of such bodies, whatever they may be. They always excite our admiration. They are full of wonder. They come from the unsearchable depths of space, and after shining in our heavens a few weeks, disappear in the unsearchable depths.

Alexander Winchell

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

Beautiful are the things we see More beautiful those we understand Much the most beautiful those we no not comprehend.

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.

Claud William Wright

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

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)

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.

Simon Conway Morris

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

Where could the naturalist seek for more telling documents of the history of creation than in the fossils themselves?

Ernst Friedrich, Baron von Schlotheim

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

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.

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

The most complete human being is he or she who consciously or unconsciously obeys the profound physical laws of our being in such a way that the spirit receives as much help and as little hindrance from the body as possible.

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

George Gaylord Simpson

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

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 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

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.