Fossils

It seems wonderful to everyone that sometimes stones are found that have figures of animals inside and outside. For outside they have an outline, and when they are broken open, the shape of the internal organs is found inside. And Avicenna says that the cause of this is that animals, just as they are, are sometimes changed into stones, and especially salty stones.

— Albertus Magnus (1200 – 1280).

Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood:
Buckland arose, and all was clear as mud.
— Bishop Shuttleworth.

We are lucky to have fossils at all. It is a remarkably fortunate fact of geology that bones, shells and other hard parts of animals, before they decay, can occasionally leave an imprint which later acts as a mould, which shapes hardening rock into a permanent memory of the animal. We don’t know what proportion of animals are fossilized after their death — I personally would consider it a very great honour to be fossilized — but it is certainly very small indeed.
— Richard Dawkins (1941 – ), The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, 225.

Be kind to colleagues, ruthless with theories is a good rule. A scientific theory isn’t merely idle speculation, it’s a verbal picture of how things might work, how a system in nature might organise things — atoms and molecules, species and ecosystems. But old palaeontological theories too often aren’t treated roughly enough. Old theories — like the reptilian nature of dinosaurs — are accepted like old friends of the family.
— Robert Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies, Penguin Books, 1986, 27.

The violence of the weather lately washed down … and exposed a mass, which, on digging out, proved to be the vertebrae of some animal, whose size must have been enormous. It is in excellent preservation, every process and part being perfect… . Many are the conjectures with respect to the animal; some imagine it to be the gigantic buffalo or the rhinoceros, and others the elephant. That intelligent osteologist, Miss Anning, of Lyme, surmises it to belong to either the behemoth or the hippopotamus, yet admits that it far exceeds their acknowledged dimensions.
— The Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1824, 548.

… the extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she had made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong … by reading and application she has arrived to that greater degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.
— Lady Harriet Silvester, who visited Anning in 1824, in her diary.

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that.
— Holy Bible, Genesis, 6:4.

As compared with their present-day representatives, the Tertiary vertebrates were characterised by their larger size; not that small species did not exist, but that many which then lived were larger than any existing today.
— C. A. Sussmilch, An Introduction to the Geology of New South Wales, Angus and Robertson, 1922, 205.

In all museums throughout the world one may see plaster casts of footprints preserved for posterity, not because the animals were particularly good of their sort, but because they had the luck to walk on the lava while it was cooling. There is just the faint hope that something similar may happen to us.
— A. B. (‘Banjo’) Paterson, ( – 1941), speaking of himself and Henry Lawson, quoted Time April 26, 1993, 44.

Every organism forms a whole … if, for instance, the intestines of an animal are so organised as only to digest fresh meat, it follows that its jaws must be constructed to devour a prey, its claws to seize and tear it, its teeth to cut and divide it, the whole structure of its locomotory organs such as to pursue and catch it; its sensory organs to perceive it at a distance …
— Baron Cuvier, (1769-1832)

… implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
— Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870), Bleak House, London, 1852, 1.

Limulus, the king crab of the sea-shore, is still identical with its ancestor found in the fossils of the Secondary geological era: during all this time the program has not varied, each generation punctually fulfilling its task of exactly reproducing the program for the following generation.
— Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973), 5.

Our young Geologist, who found
These monstrous Bones deep underground
And sent his parcel, not a light one,
To his enlightened friend at Brighton;
Imagined, perhaps, like those who send
The marbles of almighty Greece
Here, to some Antiquarian friend,
They’d make a famous Mantel-piece.
— Anonymous verse (19th century), celebrating the purchase by Gideon Mantell, of an iguanodon found in a quarry at Maidstone.

David Davies, a Welsh mine foreman, was the first to make really large collections of plant material from different coal seams. He showed that even when the plants did not differ very much, there were differences in the proportions of different kinds, just as in one meadow you will find a great deal of clover among the grass, in another very little.
J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) Everything Has a History, Allen and Unwin 1951, 50.

‘It is nothing else,’ said the engineer; ‘it is light bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years — light, absorbed by plants and vegetables, being necessary for the condensation of carbon during the process of their growth, if it be not carbon in another form — and now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in the fields of coal, that latent light is again brought forth and liberated, made to work as in that locomotive, for great human purposes.’
— Samuel Smiles, Life of George Stephenson, quoted in Charles Mackay (ed.), A Thousand and One Gems of English Prose (n.d.), 240.

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