“We don’t need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution”

— Richard Dawkins , book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009), p. 164

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Richard Dawkins 322

English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941

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“Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.”

Richard Dawkins book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

“Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.”

Francis S. Collins (1950) Geneticist; Director of the National Institutes of Health

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“I published that theory [of speciational evolution] in a 1954 paper…and I clearly related it to paleontology. Darwin argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others… I noted that you are never going to find evidence of a small local populatlon that changed very rapidly in the fossil record… Gould was my course assistant at Harvard where I presented this theory again and again for three years. So he knew it thoroughly. So did Eldredge. In fact, in his 1971 paper Eldredge credited me with it. But that was lost over time.”

Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) German-American Evolutionary Biologist

Ernst Mayr (2000) " The Grand old Man of Evolution" interview by Michael Shermer and Frank Sulloway http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/mayr_interview.html, Skeptic 8 (1): 79; As cited in: Quotations Ernst Mayr on Gould http://www.stephenjaygould.org/people/mayr_quotations.html, Stephen Jay Gould Archive, 2013

“If the Darwinian package were correct, then we would expect to see the simultaneous appearance in the archeological and fossil records of evidence for bipedality, technology and increased brain size. We don't.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

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“… dinosaur bones that are supposedly millions of years old have been found to show evidence of arthritis, abscesses, and osteoarthritis. Evidence of cancer and other diseases have also been found in fossil bones. So, if a Christian believes the fossil record was laid down millions of years before the first two people, then they've accepted that there were all sorts of horrible diseases in this world before sin. How could God have described such a world as VERY GOOD?… No - our answers in Genesis make it clear that there were NO diseases before sin. This is another reason why Christians cannot believe in millions of years to form the fossil record.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

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“It is no hoax that mammalian embryos temporarily have pharyngeal pouches, which are morphologically indistinguishable from the gill slits in modern fish embryos, and that the divergence of development from there matches what is indicated in the fossil record. This is fact, not fraud. And none of these facts should be true unless evolution were true also.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

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“Although it may be extremely reasonable (especially from our present vantage point) to conclude that some part of human evolution, if not aspects of the diversification of hominoids in general, is indeed preserved in the fossil record of Africa, this does not in and of itself lead inexorably to the conclusion that humans and African apes are closely related.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

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“The question of origins can’t be proven through experimentation—indeed, there is no absolute proof for either evolution or creation! But a creation geologist looks at the layers of rock and the fossil record and finds that much of it fits in the biblical framework of a catastrophic global Flood, not in the evolutionary model of slow erosion over millions of years.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"It is a Fearful Thing to fall into the Hands of the Living God" http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/06/01/a-fearful-thing-to-fall-into-the-hands-of-the-living-god/, Around the World with Ken Ham (June 1, 2014)
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“The sudden appearance of novelty is not, as Otto Schindewolf emphasized, an unusual aspect of the fossil record.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

p, 125
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“Most people think of pterosaurs as "flying dinosaurs". When I was a boy, I remember the other kids called them "dinosaur-birds", but they were neither dinosaurs or birds. The first problem is that most people don't know any more about the fossil record than what they've seen in a few plastic pieces in a prehistoric playset. Not only do they typically think that all these things are dinosaurs, they might even think that these are all the fossil forms that are known. They have no idea how rich the fossil record is.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Pterosaurs are Terrible Lizards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_htQ8HJ1cA (December 3, 2013)

“We don’t need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution”

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Richard Dawkins 322

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