Columns Quote by David M. Raup

“The places paleontologists looked for fossils and how those fossils have been interpreted have been influenced by politics and culture, reminding us that while…

— Brian Switek

“One of the great challenges in reconstructing a mass extinction is making sense of what happened when. In the same way we have divided…

— Bill Nye

Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; that our data base is too sparse, too…

— David Pilbeam

So science alone cannot solve this problem [mass extinction of humans]. It's something that we can only tackle by bringing science together with culture,…

— Annalee Newitz

“Another expert, David Jablonski, characterizes mass extinctions as “substantial biodiversity losses” that occur rapidly and are “global in extent.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

I don't like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they're not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors.

— Luis Walter Alvarez

Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level…

— Al Gore

Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on…

— Barbara Kingsolver

“background extinction.” In ordinary times—times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs—extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it…

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to…

— Stephen Jay Gould

In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.

— Jack Horner