Sylvia Earle Quotes

I got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history - sparked by books on human evolution - then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork.

Almost all paleontologists recognize that the discovery of a complete transition is in any case unlikely.

Palaeontologists use fiction all the time.

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

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.

If the Bible is correct, and the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that means there were no dinosaurs, and museum curators have been messing with us. Or the dinosaurs were here, and we never noticed them. Or a lot of people saw them but didn't want to say anything.

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates--the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes--have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria. ...After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.

Ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.

In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.

You'd have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to think that this earth that we live in only has 6000 years of existence. It just doesn't.

I think the climate has been changing for billions of years.

Often extinctions in the ocean occur at the same time as those on land. Then again, the ice age extinctions lost many big animals, but not many sea faring ones.

No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time.

Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.

Are we the first hominids? I really, really, really doubt it.

Several times in Earth's history, rapid global warming occurred, apparently spurred by amplifying feedbacks. In each case, more than half of plant and animal species became extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine.

Feathers predate birds.

Based on the Bible, I believe that all the land animals were made on day six, and Adam and Eve were made on day six, and people try to make fun of us for believing that dinosaurs lived with people, but there are a lot of animals living today that evolution says lived with dinosaurs.

The mammoth was basically done in by climate change. The last ones survived on Wrangel Island, north of Chukotka, until 3,700 years ago. According to Eveny mythology, mammoths scooped up dirt with their tusks to form the first dry land.

I think most of the dinosaur specimens we find represent subadult sizes.

The Burgess Shale is not unique, but for those who study evolution and fossils it has become something of an icon. It provides a reference point and a benchmark, a point of common discussion and an issue of universal scientific interest.

The young Steve Jobs had a hard time articulating something that didn't exist. He could see it, taste it, knew what it felt like, but he didn't have all the language because it hadn't been invented yet. People didn't fathom the personal computer on a mass produced level.

One aspect of this is the way we have come during recent centuries to appreciate that the world and indeed the very universe in which we live have evolved over immense periods of time.

the day the asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs, making room for our little primate ancestors to grow big and brainy and to take over the planet.

Evolutionary Darwinists need to understand we are taking the dinosaurs back. This is a battle cry to recognize the science in the revealed truth of God., Did you know you can ask very simple questions to the scientists who claim that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago? You could say to them, in a very nice way of course, "Excuse me, were you there?" You are actually asking them, "Were you there to see the dinosaurs when they first came into existence? Were you there to see them alive? Were you there to see them die out?" Obviously, they weren't there, so how could they really know everything about them?