Creationists are deeply enamoured of the fossil record, because they have been taught (by each other) to repeat, over and over, the mantra that it is full of ‘gaps’. ‘Show me your “intermediates”!’ They fondly (very fondly) imagine that these ‘gaps’ are an embarrassment to evolutionists. Actually, we are lucky to have any fossils at all, let alone the massive numbers that we now do have to document evolutionary history – large numbers of which, by any standards, constitution beautiful ‘intermediates’ ... It is a bonus that we do actually have the rich seams of fossils to mine, and more are discovered every day. The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong. Nevertheless there are, of course, gaps, and creationists love them observingly. Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth p145
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. ibid. p147
We now have a rich supply of intermediate fossils linking modern humans to the common ancestor that we share with chimpanzees. ibid. p150
So we have fine fossil documentation of gradual change, all the way from Lucy, the ‘upright-walking-chimp’ of three million years ago, to ourselves today. ibid. p198
Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Richard Dawkins, lecture New York Academy of Sciences October 2009, CSpan2 TV, Youtube 1.24.35
The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.) Carl Sagan, Cosmos
By studying fossils he exploded the myth of the Biblical creation. Alan Yentob, Leonardo: The Man Who Wanted To Know Everything, BBC 2011
China: in recent years spectacular fossils have been unearthed here. Planet Dinosaur 2/6: Feathered Dragons, BBC 2011
A fossil hunter needs sharp eyes and a keen search image, a mental template that subconsciously evaluates everything he sees in his search for telltale clues. A kind of mental radar works even if he isn’t concentrating hard. A fossil mollusk expert has a mollusk search image. A fossil antelope expert has an antelope search image ... Yet even when one has a good internal radar, the search is incredibly more difficult than it sounds. Not only are fossils often the same color as the rocks among which they are found, so they blend in with the background; they are also usually broken into odd-shaped fragments.
... In our business, we don't expect to find a whole skull lying on the surface staring up at us. The typical find is a small piece of petrified bone. The fossil hunter's search therefore has to have an infinite number of dimensions, matching every conceivable angle of every shape of fragment of every bone on the human body. Richard E Leakey, describing Kamoya Kimeu’s discovery of complete specimen of Homo Erectus
An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal. Richard E Leakey (co-author Roger Amos Lewin 1946) Origins: What New Discoveries Reveal About the Emergence of our Species and its Possible Future
As an antiquary of a new order, I have been obliged to learn the art of deciphering and restoring these remains, of discovering and bringing together, in their primitive arrangement, the scattered and mutilated fragments of which they are composed, of reproducing in all their original proportions and characters, the animals to which these fragments formerly belonged, and then of comparing them with those animals which still live on the surface of the earth; an art which is almost unknown, and which presupposes, what had scarcely been obtained before, an acquaintance with those laws which regulate the coexistence of the forms by which the different parts of organized being are distinguished. Baron Georges Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles, 1812
It isn’t easy to become a fossil ... Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today – that’s 270 million people with 206 bones each – will only be about 50 bones, one-quarter of a complete skeleton. That’s not to say, of course, that any of these bones will ever actually be found. Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003
As a historical science, evolution is confirmed by the fact that so many independent lines of evidence converge to its single conclusion. Independent sets of data from geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, herpetology, entomology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, genetics and population genetics, and many other sciences each point to the conclusion that life evolved. This is a convergence of evidence. Creationists can demand ‘just one fossil transitional form’ that shows evolution. But evolution is not proved through a single fossil. It is proved through a convergence of fossils, along with a convergence of genetic comparisons between species, and a convergence of anatomical and physiological comparisons between species, and many other lines of inquiry. For creationists to disprove evolution, they need to unravel all these independent lines of evidence, as well as construct a rival theory that can explain them better than the theory of evolution. Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters
When people in the past came across the fossilised bones of large vanished animals it begged any number of questions ... What did they mean? Tom Holland, Dinosaurs, Myths & Monsters, BBC 2011
Many of the dinosaurs in the Peabody [Museum] were dug up in the 1870s. ibid.
Tales told across the great plains not of thunder-horses but of thunderbirds. ibid.
Even before the time of Homer himself people were telling the story of one of the most celebrated monsters in all Greek mythology ... a Cyclops. ibid.
Samos ... The ancients who came across the bones here and explained them as the remains of elephants were blazing a trail that would be followed by eighteenth century, by nineteenth century palaeontologists. ibid.
Giant fossilised monsters back in classical times are now made for phenomenal box office. ibid.
In China the figure of the dragon ... Reach as far back as 6 B.C. ibid.
So closely associated with the devil were footprints of prehistoric creatures that it was not unknown for attempts to be made to neutralize their malign power. ibid.
In 1788 a Scottish geologist named James Hutton ... proposed that the Earth was infinitely more ancient than humanity. Indeed, Hutton could find no evidence for there having been a creation at all. ibid.
Buckland was merely the first of many clergymen to wrestle with the implications. ibid.
Dinosaurs – the name reflected the two sides of Owen’s complex personality. ibid.
Deep inside a craggy cave in Texas Hill country countless ice-age fossils lie encased in the rock. Are these ancient remains evidence of an unknown mass-extinction. Secrets of the Underground s1e8, Discovery 2017
Scientists have found this same layer all around the world. Below it fossils from countless species, above it 70% of them are gone including the dinosaurs. Tony Robinson, Catastrophe IV: Asteroid Strike, Channel 4 2008
For more than a century Americans have had a love affair with dinosaurs. Extinct for millions of years, they were barely known until giant fossil bones were discovered in the mid-nineteenth century. Two American scientists – Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh led the way to many of these discoveries. Dinosaur Wars, PBS 2011
We now have a rich supply of intermediate fossils linking modern humans to the common ancestor that we share with – chimpanzees. ibid. p150