Paleontologist

🇺🇸Thomas Jefferson

Politics

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."

🇺🇸Stephen Jay Gould

Science

1941–2002

"The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the “liberal” rhetoric of “equal time.” But mistake it not."

🇺🇸Louis Agassiz

Science

1807–1873

"The facts will eventually test all our theories, and they form, after all, the only impartial jury to which we can appeal."

🇺🇸Gregory Scott Paul

Art

b. 1954

"Put a leopard and a together and the former would be in trouble."

Thomas Henry Huxley

Science

1825–1895

"Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once."

🇰🇪Richard Leakey

Politics

humanism

1944–2022

"It is impossible to imagine existence in the absence of subjective sensation we call reflective consciousness."

🇫🇷Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Religion

1881–1955

"The Human Phenomenon Excerpts from the book"

🇺🇸Henry Fairfield Osborn

Science

1857–1935

"This chain of human ancestors was totally unknown to Darwin. He could not have even dreamed of such a flood of proof and truth."

Richard Owen

Science

1804–1892

"No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin."

🇬🇧Gideon Mantell

Science

1790–1852

"Upon fixing my residence at Lewes, I resolved to devote my leisure moments to the investigation of the "Organic remains of a former world"..."

🇬🇧William Buckland

Science

1784–1856

"The taste of mole was the most repulsive I knew until I tasted a bluebottle ."

🇺🇸George Gaylord Simpson

Science

1902–1984

"I don't think that evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty; it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important."

🇺🇸Caitlín R. Kiernan

Literature

b. 1964

"Cover artist Ryan Obermeyer's online portfolio"

🇺🇸Neil Shubin

Science

b. 1960

"Just as Darwin’s theory predicted: at the right time, at the right place, we had found intermediates between two apparently different kinds of animals."

🇩🇪Rudolf Virchow

Medicine

1821–1902

"Between animal and human medicine, there is no dividing line—nor should there be."

🇦🇺Tim Flannery

Science

b. 1956

"Some time this century, the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all natural factors."

🇫🇷Georges Cuvier

Science

1769–1832

"It is evident that one cannot say anything demonstrable about the problem before having resolved these preliminary questions, and yet we hardly possess the necessary information to solve some of them."

"More than one hundred years ago, William Bateson suggested that studying the regulation and timing of development was the key to understanding evolutionary change. He was right."

"Second, and far more serious, are particular examples of a sophistry and sleight of hand in the misuse of metaphor, and more importantly a distortion of metaphysics in support of an evolutionary programme."

🇺🇸Roy Chapman Andrews

Science

1884–1960

"I wanted to go everywhere. I would have started on a day’s notice for the North Pole or the South, to the jungle or the desert. It made not the slightest difference to me."

🇺🇸Mary Doria Russell

Literature

b. 1950

"One minute, she was in the State of Puerto Rico and the next minute, she was in the State of Persistent Vegetables."

🇺🇸Robert T. Bakker

paleontology

b. 1945

"The dinosaurs are not extinct. The colorful and successful diversity of the living birds is a continuing expression of basic dinosaur biology."

"We will be one of the extinguished species. The good news is that life on the planet will recover and peace will return to the environment."