Fossil

“The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.”

“To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”

“When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren’t there.”

“Sometime in the first billion years, life appeared on the earth’s surface. Slowly, the fossil record indicates, living organisms climbed the ladder from simple to more advanced forms.”

“The critical first billion years, during which life began, are blank pages in the earth’s history.”

“The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms.”

“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.”

“There are a hundred million fossils, all catalogued and identified, in museums around the world.”

“Beginning at the base of the Cambrian period and extending for about 10 million years, all the major groups of skeletonized invertebrates made their first appearance in the most spectacular rise in diversity ever recorded on our planet.”

“Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record.”