“At the sight of a single bone, of a single piece of bone, I recognize and reconstruct the portion of the whole from which it would have been taken. The whole being is rebuilt.”— Georges Cuvier
“At the sight of a single bone, of a single piece of bone, I recognize and reconstruct the portion of the whole from which it would have been taken.”— Georges Cuvier
“The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive the light, there must have been light to enter it.”— Louis Agassiz
“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.”— Georges Cuvier
“The appearance of the bones of quadrupeds, especially those of complete skeletons, testifies to the existence of a world previous to ours, and destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.”— Georges Cuvier
“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.”— Georges Cuvier
“The Burgess Shale is not a bizarre collection of evolutionary dead-ends, but a window into the origins of the major animal groups that exist today.”— Simon Conway Morris
“What we see in the fossil record is not a random branching bush, but a series of constrained channels leading to specific outcomes.”— Simon Conway Morris