The eyes of that species of extinct giant, whose bones fill the mounds of America, have gazed on Niagara as our eyes do now.
I have a real passion for bones. I have many others in Boisgeloup: skeletons of birds, dog's and sheep's heads. I even have a rhinoceros skull.
I went to my first dinosaur hall with my father and twin brother. We went to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was blown away by the dinosaurs.
In April 2001, I visited Big Bone Lick State Park in Kentucky. The heaps of mastodon and other large skeletons that used to loom out of the brackish backwaters along the Ohio River here are long gone, though the occasional big bone sometimes comes to light.
That ere long, now that curiosity has been so much excited on this subject, some human remains will be detected in the older alluvium of European valleys, I confidently expect.
The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.
Many dinosaurs were smaller than chickens.
We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.
We hence acquire this sublime and interesting idea; that all the calcareous mountains in the world, and all the strata of clay, coal, marl, sand, and iron, which are incumbent on them, are MONUMENTS OF THE PAST FELICITY OF ORGANIZED NATURE!
I'll bet you a six-pack of Coors that pretty soon, people will be discovering Cretaceous parasites inside Cretaceous bones. The possibility of looking into epidemiology and pathology is pretty cool.
I am convinced, by repeated observation, that marbles, lime-stones, chalks, marls, clays, sand, and almost all terrestrial substances, wherever situated, are full of shells and other spoils of the ocean.
Normally, we are happy to find a fragment of jaw, a few isolated teeth, a bit of an arm, a bit of a skull. But to find associated body parts is extremely rare.
In our case, finding a Lucy is unique. No one will ever find another Lucy. You can't order one from a biological supply house. It's a unique discovery, a unique specimen.
In valley drift we meet commonly with the bones of quadrupeds which graze on plains bordering rivers.
Welcome...to Jurassic Park!
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.
