Greg Graffin Quotes

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.

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

Fossils have richer stories to tell - about the lub-dub of dinosaur life - than we have been willing to listen to.

I can't think of any other region in the world which is such a vast source of fossils.

The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.

I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my job is to define man's place in nature and explore what makes us human.

All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.

I've seen many dinosaur fossils, some mounted in museums, others in the process of being extracted from their rocky matrix, and it has never occurred to me that any could be anything other than genuine.

I found my first dinosaur bone when I was 6, growing up in Montana. Ever since then I've been interested in dinosaurs.

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.

There's something about dinosaurs that should be very humbling to human beings.

Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs.

A dinosaur out of context is like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from amnesia.

I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.

The impact of the magazine was very strong. As I said, it portrayed dinosaurs as part of the geological history, part of the story of life on earth. It struck that paleontology was the career for me.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a palaeontologist. I wanted to dig up dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs did not walk with humans. The evolutionary record says different. They gambled.

And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.

As you know, the fossil record includes not only the ancestors of crocodiles and whales, but also the ancestors of human beings. And this, of course, is why evolution remains controversial.

My kids and I sometimes will just sit in my office and talk about what the world was like 68 million years ago. Amanda, our oldest daughter, wanted to be a paleontologist for a long time.

How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation', with an ugly emphasis on Brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?

I watched all these movies like 'King Kong' and 'Godzilla' when I was growing up, and the fact that dinosaurs actually lived on this earth, the fact that they are not fake, made them very fascinating.

When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Boelsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx.

I grew up loving dinosaurs, digging up things.

Only a tiny fraction of corpses fossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water.