Ancestor Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

Established species are evolving so slowly that major transitions between genera and higher taxa must be occurring within small rapidly evolving populations that leave…

— Steven M. Stanley

Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record…

— Anonymous

It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families,…

— George Gaylord Simpson

Paleontologists ever since Darwin have been searching (largely in vain) for the sequences of insensibly graded series of fossils that would stand as examples…

— Niles Eldredge

Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin's postulate of gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual…

— Ernst Mayr

The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution i.e., a species becoming a new species accomplishing a major morphological…

— Steven M. Stanley

“Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and palaeontology does not provide them.”

— David Kitts

By comparing the human and chimp genomes, we can see the process of evolution clearly in the changes (in DNA) since we diverged from…

— Bob Waterston

“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

“There can be no doubt that the existing Fauna and Flora is but the last term of a long series of equally numerous contemporary…

— Thomas Henry Huxley

If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely…

— Stephen Jay Gould

We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much... We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition…

— David M. Raup