Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Eocene. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Eocene Quotes And Sayings by 81 Authors including Simon Conway Morris,Michael Shermer,Vernor Vinge,Brian Swimme,Georges Cuvier for you to enjoy and share.
The Burgess Shale is not unique, but for those who study evolution and fossils it has become something of an icon. It provides a reference point and a benchmark, a point of common discussion and an issue of universal scientific interest.
We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.
I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
Four billion years ago the planet Earth was molten rock; now it sings opera!
Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.
The discoveries of modern science do not disagree with the oldest traditions which claim an incredible antiquity for our race.
We extol ancient things, regardless of our own times.
[Lat., Vetera extollimus recentium incuriosi.]
The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast - above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill - has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.
Well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe.
It is my object, in the following work, to travel over ground which has as yet been little explored and to make my reader acquainted with a species of Remains, which, though absolutely necessary for understanding the history of the globe, have been hitherto almost uniformly neglected.
In my lab, we're interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth.
Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.
You, right this minute, stand at the growing tip of evolution. The next thing you think, the next action you take, will either create a new possibility for you, or it will repeat the past.
In vertebrate paleontology, increasing knowledge leads to triumphant loss of clarity.
A new species is arising on the planet, it is arising now and you are it.
Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.
This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology.
In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool-wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis - man, the inventor of the city - we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages.
Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.
Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and palaeontology does not provide them.
During cycles long anterior to the creation of the human race, and while the surface of the globe was passing from one condition to another, whole races of animals-each group adapted to the physical conditions in which they lived-were successively created and exterminated.
The record of the rocks contains very little, other than bacteria and one-celled plants until, about a billion years ago, after some three billion years of invisible progress, a major breakthrough occurred. The first many-celled creatures appeared on earth.
From year to year, environmental changes are incremental and often barely register in our lives, but from evolutionary or geological perspectives, what is happening is explosive change.
Is likely to survive for another 100 billion years or more.
The etymologist finds the deadest words to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.
The discovery informs about the origins and early evolution of arthropods, the most ubiquitous, species-rich, morphologically diverse and successful animal group on Earth.
The Silurian Period-the grandest of all the Periods,-and, as yet, apparently the seed-time of all succeeding life.
The paleoclimate record shouts to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth's climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.
Since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.
Your body and the environment around you may reflect the disturbing and unusual activities unfolding across the globe as the planet evolves.
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.
For four - fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pondscum.
Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.
The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.
IF WE FIRST APPEAR IN THE PLEISTOCENE, I THINK THIS IS WHEN WE DISAPPEAR - I GUESS A MILLION YEARS OF MAN IS ENOUGH
Nature's old felicities.
Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.
Now, evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen.
Horizontal and vertical sprawl ... are the dinosaurs of an ending fossil-fuel age of synthetic culture.
Weber sandstone a billion years old. This rock was Precambrian, I read, a term like postmodern, suggesting that what it names is so mysterious as to require identification by what it isn't.
The only problem is that it's difficult to imagine something entirely new. We use the words and definitions of the past to shape our ideas. Something that is genuinely the next evolutionary step is unlikely to resemble anything we can imagine. Even the best books on the subject are limited." She'd
There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.
Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task.
Of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos,
The museum claims Ebenezer the Allosaurus - the centrepiece of their new exhibit - 'met his end during Noah's Flood about 4,300 years ago
This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And
Two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence.
Archie says -Science- the same way he says -Modern-, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them.
There was nothing left of Earth. They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun.
Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.
It occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made of this question (the origin of the species) by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it
Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.
PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.
As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
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.
I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.
The individual is at the apex of his species' past, at the entrance to its future.
As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
encephalized species
And there is an earlier Wilson cycle, too, a billion years old, entrapped alongside the Appalachians: the Grenville, which rises to the surface in Central Park, New York, to remind us that the human and urban is no more than foam on the sea of the past.
In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.
The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.
Old age transfigures or fossilizes.
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.
On a perfect planet such as might be acceptable to a physicist, one might predict that from its origin the diversity of life would grow exponentially until the carrying capacity, however defined, was reached. The fossil record on Earth, however, tells a very different story.
I long ago suggested the hypothesis, that in the basin of the Thames there are indications of a meeting in the Pleistocene period of a northern and southern fauna.
A carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape.
Anthroposophy is not a game, nor just a theory; it is a task that must be faced for the sake of human evolution.
That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution
not biological, but cultural evolution ... The Ascent of Man.
We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities - the hallmarks of civilisation.
Palaeontological research exhibits, beyond question, the phenomenon of provinces in time, as well as provinces in space.
Palaeontologists cannot live by uniformitarianism alone. This may be termed the Phenomenon of the Fallibility of the Fossil Record.
If a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water.
If the Earth were as old as a person, a typical organism would be born, live and die in a sliver of a second. We are fleeting, transitional creatures, snowflakes fallen on the hearth fire.
The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth.
The hypothetical aquatic phase of the ancestral apes during the fossil gap would have been brief, a matter of two or three million years.
Welcome...to Jurassic Park!
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy.
Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we - we were the flukes and the fossils. We
It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny
The order of ... successive generations is indeed much more clearly proved than many a legend which has assumed the character of history in the hands of man; for the geological record is the work of God.
We're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. So we're the amoebas.
The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology.
Established species are evolving so slowly that major transitions between genera and higher taxa must be occurring within small rapidly evolving populations that leave NO LEGIBLE FOSSIL RECORD.
Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.
When I realized, in 1978, that Lucy did represent a new species of human ancestor, and that I had an opportunity to name this new species, I realized this was a revolutionary step in understanding human origins.
As our technological capacities continue to increase and our environment becomes ever more fragile and endangered, we find that changes to the Earth that used to take ten thousand years now take a fraction of that.
In talking of evolution, it is common to have in mind a tree.
We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.
A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.
I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.
Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the idea of evolution in a tone of thunderous innuendo.
For soon, the dark millenium will fall, and the world will be a different place, requiring different species. Cataracts will occlude the Sun, shutting out its hateful light, and fabulous new life-forms shall flourish and struggle beneath the perpetual stars.
Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish.
We - mankind - stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device - our consciousness of the crisis - as our unique contribution.
The year was 1922, and the Curies had transformed plain earth into something rare and unimagined. A secret of the universe has been revealed, and a restless world dreamed of transformation. [p. 205]
The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.