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“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.”
― John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live in

“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

“I do not respect you, and I will never let you have any of my fossil fish”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“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

“I could have panicked. Before the journey I might have. But something had shifted in me while I spent all that time on deck watching the horizon: I was responsible for myself. I was Elizabeth Philpot , and I collected fossil fish.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“Besides, no one can keep me away from my fish. Thank you, by the way, for the crate of fish you left for me. They are a delight. Come, let us go down to the sea.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“So we continued, arm in arm along the beach, talking until at last we had no more to say, like a storm that blows itself out, and our eyes dropped to the ground, where the curies were waiting for us to find them.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“I am Elizabeth Philpot," I declard, "and I collect fossil fish.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“Mary Anning and I are hunting fossils on the beach, she her creatures, I my fish. Our eyes are fastened to the sand and rocks as we make our way along the shore at different paces, first one in front, then the other. Mary stops to split open a nodule and find what may be lodged within. I dig through clay, searching for something new and miraculous. We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“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

“There is nothing like geology; the pleasure of the first day's partridge shooting or first day's hunting cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue." Charles Darwin, letter to his sister Catherine, 1834”
― Charles Darwin

“Sticks and Stones

I dreamt a fossil came to life
and told a tale of his former wife
Did she beat him? Where?
She broke his fingers on the stairs
And tore out lumps of his orange hair
How could she?
Then she gave him pride of place
At an archaeological feast in his honour
A prehistoric horse was the main course!

© Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“… if some metaphors can persist in the language as fossils, it puts every metaphor under a cloud of suspicion.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“The traces of the dinosaurs howl in our memories. Had they been alive we would have exterminated them, but we respect their traces. It is the same with the human race: the more we imperil it, the more meticulously we preserve its remains.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“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

“As the floodwaters advanced during the global Flood, humans would have fled to higher ground, swam, or held on to floating debris for as long as possible. Also, human corpses tend to bloat and therefore float on the water’s surface. Hence, it makes sense that very few, if any, humans would be buried by sediment. Instead, they would have rotted and decayed without fossilization. It is expected that marine creatures and plants were the first things buried and fossilized, since they are at a lower elevation and couldn’t escape the sediment and water. When we look at the fossil record, statistically we find: 95% of all fossils were marine organisms. 95% of the remaining 5% were algae, plants/trees. 95% of the remaining 0.25% were invertebrates, including insects. The remaining 0.0125% were vertebrates, mostly fish.”
― Ken Ham, A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter

“John Woodmorappe’s studies indicate that there are about 700 million cubic kilometers, which translates to about 168 million cubic miles of Flood sediment.13 Dr. John Morris states that there is about 350 million cubic miles of Flood sediment.14 However, this number may be high since the total volume of water on the earth is estimated at about 332.5 million cubic miles according to the U.S. Geological Survey.15 So, a small human population and massive amounts of sediment are two prominent factors why we haven’t found human fossils in pre-Flood sediments.”
― Ken Ham, A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter

“In other instances, some of these animals may have made it to a particular area and become extinct for various reasons — ultimately due to sin, of course! One objection to this is that we should find fossils of them if they lived in an area, but this is fallacious.2 Paul Taylor states the following regarding this subject on fossils: But the expectation of such fossils is a presuppositional error. Such an expectation is predicated on the assumption that fossils form gradually and inevitably from animal populations. In fact, fossilization is by no means inevitable. It usually requires sudden, rapid burial. Otherwise the bones would decompose before permineralization. One ought likewise to ask why it is that, despite the fact that millions of bison used to roam the prairies of North America, hardly any bison fossils are found there. Similarly, lion fossils are not found in Israel even though we know that lions once lived there.”
― Ken Ham, A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter

“The fossils were sublime, but I found as much fascination in the odd paraphernalia of culture that, for various reasons, end up in museum drawers. Late eighteenth century apothecary boxes, thread cases from the mills of Lawrence, Victorian cigar boxes of gaudy Cuban design - all the better to house fossils.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

“To cross the southern coast of England, west to east, is thus to travel forwards - and at breathtaking chronological speed - in a self-propelled time-machine. With every few hundred yards of eastward progress one passes through hundreds of thousands of years of geological time: a million years of history goes by with every couple of miles march.”
― Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology

“Interestingly, like many of the insects, scorpions appear deep in the rocks of the earth. And they are easily recognized in those deep rocks for what they are - scorpions. The reality is that scorpions abruptly appear in the rocks in their completed forms. It's true there used to be scorpions that are no longer with us, but this is no help to the theory of evolution. Nevertheless, scorpions suddenly appearing in the rocks as scorpions is precisely what we would expect on the basis of the Biblical model of creation.”
― Vance Nelson, Untold Secrets of Planet Earth: Monumental Monsters

“It was a modern folklorist name Adrienne Mayor who first noticed that the Ancient Greek stories of the griffin (which had the body of a lion, head and claws of an eagle, tail of a serpent) perfectly described a Protoceratops. The Greeks believed that the griffin guarded treasures of gold. Mayor discovered that fossilized skulls of Protoceratops were often found in Mongolia, where the Greeks traveled to trade for gold.”
― Ian Lendler, The First Dinosaur: How Science Solved the Greatest Mystery on Earth

“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

“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