A specialist in paleontology

Usage examples of palaeontologist.

That he was a man of extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not questioned, nor that be was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment.

The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists, for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and by none more forcibly than by Professor Sedgwick, as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species.

Closely connected with the statement, that the organic remains from an intermediate formation are in some degree intermediate in character, is the fact, insisted on by all palaeontologists, that fossils from two consecutive formations are far more closely related to each other, than are the fossils from two remote formations.

So, palaeontologists could be wrong in assuming a geographical connection when they find fossils of similar-looking creatures in different parts of the globe.

I am aware that two palaeontologists, whose opinions are worthy of much deference, namely Bronn and Woodward, have concluded that the average duration of each formation is twice or thrice as long as the average duration of specific forms.

When such varieties returned to their ancient homes, as they would differ from their former state, in a nearly uniform, though perhaps extremely slight degree, they would, according to the principles followed by many palaeontologists, be ranked as new and distinct species.

We see this in the plainest manner by the fact that all the most eminent palaeontologists, namely Cuvier, Owen, Agassiz, Barrande, Falconer, E.

I need give only one instance, namely, the manner in which the fossils of the Devonian system, when this system was first discovered, were at once recognised by palaeontologists as intermediate in character between those of the overlying carboniferous, and underlying Silurian system.

She framed the words commendingly, as a palaeontologist might read off the name of an unexpectedly well preserved fossil.

They were of the reptile kind, with body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard.

Even though we seldom find a complete historical record as we dig down through the rocks of any one area, a good record can be pieced together from overlapping portions in different areas (actually, although I use the image of 'digging down', palaeontologists seldom literally dig downwards through strata.

But to geologists and palaeontologists this land of sandstones and shales, piled up into the tablelands the Afrikaners called koppies, was one of the Earth's greatest storehouses: a thousand-mile slab of sedimentary rock that was the best record on Earth of land-animal evolution.

Anyway, whether you call it a successional trend or an evolutionary trend, the species selectionists may well be right to believe that it is this kind of trend that they, as palaeontologists, are often dealing with in successive strata of the fossil record.

In this legend Celts and Teutons are primeval and immutable creatures, like a triceratops and a stegosaurus (bigger than a rhinoceros and more pugnacious, as popular palaeontologists depict them), fixed not only in shape but in innate and mutual hostility, and endowed even in the mists of antiquity, as ever since, with the peculiarities of mind and temper which can be still observed in the Irish or the Welsh on the one hand and the English on the other: the wild incalculable poetic Celt, full of vague and misty imaginations, and the Saxon, solid and practical when not under the influence of beer.