Ancestry Quote by Jacques Monod

When out fossil hunting, it is very easy to forget that rather than telling you how the creatures lived, the remains you find indicate…

— Richard Leakey

One must believe that every living thing whatsoever must change insensibly in its organization and in its form... One must therefore never expect to…

— Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have…

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Fossils are one of the major lines of evidence that we use to understand ourselves.”

— Neil Shubin

Wherever we look at the living biota … discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent…The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species usually…

— Ernst Mayr

“Most living things never get fossilized, and most fossils end up in places where they are impossible to discover. It is impressive that paleontologists…

— Bill Nye

A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil... not the cross.

— Greg Graffin

“Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their…

— Thomas Henry Huxley

“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,…

— Gareth J. Nelson

As you know, the fossil record includes not only the ancestors of crocodiles and whales, but also the ancestors of human beings. And this,…

— Kenneth R. Miller

There are enough fossils showing distinctive features to rule out the possibility these are unusual or aberrant modern humans

— Anonymous

“No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into…

— Henry Gee