#fossils

For fossils to thrive, certain favorable circumstances are required. First of all, of course, remnants of life have to be there. These then need to be washed over with water as soon as possible, so that the bones are covered with a layer of sediment. ↗

— Richard Leakey

#certain #circumstances #course #covered #favorable

The sand stones had fragments of charcoal on some surfaces but found no recognisable fossils. ↗

— George Mercer Dawson

#fossils #found #fragments #had #recognisable

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. ↗

— George G. Simpson

#earth #even #expect #extinct #extremely

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

#earth #fossils #geology #paleontology #nature

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. ↗

— Georges Cuvier

#alone #anyone #birth #dreamed #earth

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

#darwin #darwinism #evolution #fossil-record #fossils

We are concerned that, in a few years time, this place of discovery, with its wealth of human fossils, the like of which can be found nowhere else in the world, could be completely destroyed. ↗

— Richard Leakey

#concerned #could #destroyed #discovery #else

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

— Pierre Loti

#been #creations #fossils #had #i