53 Quotes About Fossils

Fossils do not require long ages to form. In fact, they must form quickly, otherwise the organism’s softer tissues and even bones suffer decay (shells or teeth enamel naturally take longer to disintegrate).

Turning hard material (e.g., bones) into fossils is easy in a lab setting, but in 1993, scientists were even able to make fossils from soft animal tissues! New York Times’ Science Watch reports: Scientists have for the first time produced fossils of soft animal tissues in a laboratory. In the process they discovered that most of the phosphate required for the fossilization of small animal carcasses comes from within the animal itself.

To cross the southern coast of England, west to east, is thus to travel forwards - and at breathtaking chronological speed - in a self-propelled time-machine. With every few hundred yards of eastward progress one passes through hundreds of thousands of years of geological time: a million years of history goes by with every couple of miles march.

Sticks and StonesI dreamt a fossil came to lifeand told a tale of his former wifeDid she beat him? Where?She broke his fingers on the stairsAnd tore out lumps of his orange hairHow could she?Then she gave him pride of placeAt an archaeological feast in his honourA prehistoric horse was the main course!© Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved.

To greet each day ossified;Like fossil remains forgotten beneath the feet of something more lively.

The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.

The fossils were sublime, but I found as much fascination in the odd paraphernalia of culture that, for various reasons, end up in museum drawers. Late eighteenth century apothecary boxes, thread cases from the mills of Lawrence, Victorian cigar boxes of gaudy Cuban design - all the better to house fossils.

Quite recently the human descent theory has been stigmatized as the 'gorilla theory of human ancestry.' All this despite the fact that Darwin himself, in the days when not a single bit of evidence regarding the fossil ancestors of man was recognized, distinctly stated that none of the known anthropoid apes, much less any of the known monkeys, should be considered in any way as ancestral to the human stock.

I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil I’d like to be. I guess I’d like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserved as the track of some lug-soled creature locked in the sandstone- how did it walk, what did it eat, and did it love sunshine?