Adrienne Mayor Quotes

I grew up in Los Angeles, and I was always fascinated by the La Brea Tar Pits. Right in the middle of the city, in an area called the Miracle Mile, for crying out loud, we have these eldritch ponds of dark, bubbling goo. And down in the muck, there're all these amazing fossils: mammoth and saber tooth cat and dire wolf.

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.

One of my kids keeps on saying that he wants to be a paleontologist, but first he wants to make a time machine, so he can go back and save the dinosaurs.

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

We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.

As a kid, I knew all of the dinosaurs. It's one of those tragedies that I've forgotten what dinosaurs are cool.

I grew up loving dinosaurs, digging up things.

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

Dinosaurs are the jumper cables to the human mind. Kids can't curb their enthusiasm when they're in a hall of dinosaurs and mammoths and mammoth hunters and trilobites and giant fish that could chomp up a shark. These natural objects in motion and context make kids want to read; you can't stop them from reading and thinking.

I'm not sure the Russians would be happy that their iconic wooly mammoth has North American origins.

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

I can only really speak for myself and what I've noticed in my kids and the people in my life, but because dinosaurs were real, and yet they seem so fantastical, is why they held such a huge fascination for me as a child. They're so different from human beings.

Certainly paleontologists have found samples of an extremely small fraction, only, of the earth's extinct species, and even for groups that are most readily preserved and found as fossils they can never expect to find more than a fraction.

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

I also discovered the only complete Brontosaurus skull.

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

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

Historical science is being left in the dust.

Lucy brought with her an image of our human ancestors that you don't get when you find a jaw or an arm bone or a leg bone. Here was 40 percent of a single skeleton.

Almost all of my graduate students say that they got interested in dinosaurs because of 'Jurassic Park.'

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

If you were to go to the National Museum in Addis Ababa, you would walk into a huge room filled with literally tens of tons of fossils, and most of them would be elephants and rhinos and hippopotamus and monkeys and giraffes and antelopes and so on. Hominids are very rare in the landscape, and it's very rare to find them.

In pre-school, I was drawing dinosaurs - I was huge into dinosaurs. I wanted to be a paleontologist, not a cartoonist or a filmmaker or anything like that - just a paleontologist. So I would draw dinosaurs.

I dug things up. I was curious. I liked to draw what I found.

What you do on a dinosaur expedition is you hike and look at the ground. You find bones sticking out of the dirt and, once you see something, you dig.