Steven Pinker Quotes

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.

The impact of the magazine was very strong. As I said, it portrayed dinosaurs as part of the geological history, part of the story of life on earth. It struck that paleontology was the career for me.

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.

The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.

Almost all paleontologists recognize that the discovery of a complete transition is in any case unlikely.

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

I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.

Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs.

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

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.

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

I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.

For fossils to thrive, certain favorable circumstances are required. First of all, of course, remnants of life have to be there. These then need to be washed over with water as soon as possible, so that the bones are covered with a layer of sediment.

Nature got it right with the cranes. They have been around since the Eocene, which ended 34 million years ago.

My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.

As you know, the fossil record includes not only the ancestors of crocodiles and whales, but also the ancestors of human beings. And this, of course, is why evolution remains controversial.

The appearance of the bones of quadrupeds, especially those of complete bodies in the strata, tells us either that the layer itself which carries them was in earlier times dry land or that dry land was at least formed in the immediate area.

I think most of the dinosaur specimens we find represent subadult sizes.

Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.

Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link.

When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Boelsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx.

I've seen many dinosaur fossils, some mounted in museums, others in the process of being extracted from their rocky matrix, and it has never occurred to me that any could be anything other than genuine.

Ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.