You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.
Books are sharks... because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.
There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.
So, the ant way of life is very ancient and very successful. As far as human beings are concerned, we've been around for only one million years--too soon be sure.
The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.
Nature got it right with the cranes. They have been around since the Eocene, which ended 34 million years ago.
Sharks are really serious animals. They've been around longer than dinosaurs. They're basically prehistoric killing machines, and that's terrifying and fascinating, at the same time.
There's something about dinosaurs that should be very humbling to 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.
I'm not sure the Russians would be happy that their iconic wooly mammoth has North American origins.
Selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago. She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis.
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.
Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.
A dinosaur out of context is like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from amnesia.
