Fossil Hunters Quotes

The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.

I nurtured my dinomania with documentaries, delighted in the dino-themed B movies I brought home from the video store, and tore up my grandparents' backyard in my search of a perfect Triceratops nest. Never mind that the classic three-horned dinosaur never roamed central New Jersey, or that the few dinosaur fossils found in the state were mostly scraps of skeletons that had been washed out into the Cretaceous Atlantic. My fossil hunter's intuition told me there just had to be a dinosaur underneath the topsoil, and I kept excavating my pit. That is, until I got the hatchet out of my grandfather's toolshed and tried to cut down a sapling that was in my way. My parents bolted out of the house and put a stop to my excavation. Apparently, I hadn't filled out the proper permits before I started my dig.

I found that this was a desert region so obscure that the designers of atlases typically stitch page bindings directly over that very latitude and longitude, obliterating the map’s topography as surely as any sandstorm.

Repression. Her therapist, Dr. Solomon, loved the word. He'd say it slowly, letting it roll off his tongue. Sometimes he'd add a chin stroke for good measure. He always looked pleased when he did this, like he'd discovered the Caramilk secret or something.

Some five decades later, writer Terry Sullivan was inspired by Mary’s life story to compose the popular tongue twister : She sells seashells on the seashore The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure So if she sells seashells on the seashore Then I’m sure she sells seashore shells.

Jeeter?" Grace whispered into her walkie-talkie. "Are you awake?" She waited. A few weeks ago, she and Jeeter had started chatting on their walkie-talkies late at night when she couldn't sleep. He always answered her call no matter how late it was. "I'm here," his voice echoed back. "Trouble sleeping again?" "Yeah." "Another bad dream?" "Uh-huh," she sniffed, unexpected tears flooding her eyes. My dad was calling for me, but I couldn't find him." She couldn't believe she'd said it. She'd never told anyone what she saw in her dreams. But Jeeter understood. He'd told her before that he had bad dreams too, since his mom had died.

In hunter-gatherer times, [the amount of energy human beings use each day] was about 2,500 calories, all of it food. That is the daily energy intake of a common dolphin. A modern human being uses 31,000 calories a day, most of it in the form of fossil fuel. That is the intake of a pilot whale. And the average American uses six times that-as much as a sperm whale. We have become, in other words, different from the people we used to be.... We've ... gotten bigger. We appear to be the same species, with stomachs of the same size, but we aren't.1o

Good thing we weren't here when this happened," Fred added. "We'd be pancakes - DEAD ones!

It wasn't an accident.

Dart initially echoed Darwin’s theory that bipedalism freed the hands of early hominins to make and use hunting tools, which in turn selected for big brains, hence better hunting abilities. Then, in a famous 1953 paper, clearly influenced by his war experiences, Dart proposed that the first humans were not just hunters but also murderous predators.18 Dart’s words are so astonishing, you have to read them: The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable characteristics and differentiative features; and it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous, and cannibalistic origin. The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices of their substitutes in formalized religions and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophilic practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predaceous habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora. Dart’s killer-ape hypothesis, as it came to be known, was popularized by the journalist Robert Ardrey in a best-selling book, African Genesis, that found a ready audience in a generation disillusioned by two world wars, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, political assassinations, and widespread political unrest.19 The killer-ape hypothesis left an indelible stamp on popular culture including movies like Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. But the Rousseauians weren’t dead yet. Reanalyses of bones in the limestone pits from which fossils like the Taung Baby came showed they were killed by leopards, not early humans.20 Further studies revealed these early hominins were mostly vegetarians. And as a reaction to decades of bellicosity, many scientists in the 1970s embraced evidence for humans’ nicer side, especially gathering, food sharing, and women’s roles. The most widely discussed and audacious hypothesis, proposed by Owen Lovejoy, was that the first hominins were selected to become bipeds to be more cooperative and less aggressive.21 According to Lovejoy, early hominin females favored males who were better at walking upright and thus better able to carry food with which to provision them. To entice these tottering males to keep coming back with food, females encouraged exclusive long-term monogamous relationships by concealing their menstrual cycles and having permanently large breasts (female chimps advertise when they ovulate with eye-catching swellings, and their breasts shrink when they are not nursing). Put crudely, females selected for cooperative males by exchanging sex for food. If so, then selection against reactive aggression and frequent fighting is as old as the hominin lineage.22

Mary herself is named for three real-life Marys: Mary Shelley, of course; Mary Anning, expert fossil-hunter and self-taught palaeontologist; and the celebrated mathematician and astronomer Mary Somerville, so-called ‘Queen of Science’ of the nineteenth century.

The U.S. federal recommendation for fiber intake is at least 14 g per 1,000 calories, which comes out to about 25 g a day for women and 38 g a day for men.7519 Even though that’s a far cry from the 100 g our body was designed to get (based on the diets of isolated modern-day hunter-gatherer tribes7520 and analyzing coprolites, human fossilized feces7521), fewer than 3 percent of Americans even reach the minimal minimum recommendation.

I set before myself as a boy, and have done my humble part toward building up the great science of paleontology. I shall perish, but my fossils will last as long as the museums that have secured them. My own body will crumble to dust, my soul return to the God who gave it, but the works of His hands, those animals of other days, will give joy and pleasure to generations yet unborn.

Even in those early days I used to cut out shells 3from the limestone strata of the region with whatever tools were at hand, but they were admired chiefly as examples of the wonderful power of running water to carve rocks into the semblance of shells.

The early discoveries from Lake Turkana included remarkable fossils, including a skull then thought to be the earliest specimen of Homo from anywhere in the world. Scientists today identify it as the best example of the species Homo rudolfensis, a contemporary of habilis. In 1984, the hominid gang’s most accomplished fossil hunter, Kamoya Kimeu, found the first pieces of a skeleton that would eventually become the most complete Homo erectus yet discovered. Known as Turkana Boy, it is a young male, aged at approximately 1.5 million years old, with many humanlike body structures but key differences in the brain, skull, and teeth.

aggressivity common in hunter-gatherer groups. The human fossil record shows that in the period prior to settlement, there had been a gradual thinning of the human skeleton, a process known to physical anthropologists as gracilization. Gracilization typically occurs in the skeletons of wild animal species as they become domesticated. It seems that humans underwent a similar lightening of their bone structure for the same reason—that they were becoming less aggressive. Like animals undergoing domestication, humans shed bone mass because extreme aggressivity no longer carried the same survival advantages,

During the decades after Darwin published, field geologists and paleontologists have gone on to uncover and discover thousands and thousands of fossils. They have uncovered an astonishing number of ancient dinosaurs, an overwhelming assortment of long-gone mammals, and an uncountable number of sea creature fossils. Just two years after Darwin expressed his concern about the missing fossils, the famous fossil of the birdlike Archaeopteryx was found in Germany, and that’s just one example. Later, fossil hunters found a whole range of human ancestors, including Sahelanthropus tchadensis, which may in fact be a shared ancestor with chimps as well.

Being an evolutionist means there is no bad news. If new species appear abruptly in the fossil record, that just means evolution operates in spurts. If species then persist for eons with little modification, that just means evolution takes long breaks. If clever mechanisms are discovered in biology, that just means evolution is smarter than we imagined. If strikingly similar designs are found in distant species, that just means evolution repeats itself. If significant differences are found in allied species, that just means evolution sometimes introduces new designs rapidly. If no likely mechanism can be found for the large-scale change evolution requires, that just means evolution is mysterious. If adaptation responds to environmental signals, that just means evolution has more foresight than was thought. If major predictions of evolution are found to be false, that just means evolution is more complex than we thought.