The First Dinosaur Quotes

“Rocks are the ticking clock that measure the age of the Earth.”
― Ian Lendler, The First Dinosaur: How Science Solved the Greatest Mystery on Earth

“Geology is not the study of stones. It is the study of time. Rocks are the ticking clocks that measure the age of Earth.”
― Ian Lendler, The First Dinosaur: How Science Solved the Greatest Mystery on Earth

“Inspired by the Scientific Revolution, [James] Ussher began to measure how much time was in the Bible, all the way back to “the beginning.” … Finally, in 1650, he came to a conclusion:

Earth was formed on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C….around lunchtime.

Modern science tells us that this number is wrong by approximately 4,499,994,000 years. But historians regard Ussher’s date as the first time that someone tried to calculate the age of Earth. This was the birth of geology.

In 1703, the Church of England printed an updated version of the King James Bible, the most popular version of the Bible in the world, and included Ussher’s dates in the margins. From that point on, Christians thought Ussher’s numbers were as much a part of the Bible of the words themselves.

The year 4004 B.C. became part of the religious education of every man, woman, and child in England.”
― Ian Lendler, The First Dinosaur: How Science Solved the Greatest Mystery on Earth

“Australian aborigines have the oldest continuous culture in history, dating back almost 60,000 years. In their mythology, there was a time before humans that stretched back into eternity.”
― Ian Lendler, The First Dinosaur: How Science Solved the Greatest Mystery on Earth

“It was a modern folklorist name Adrienne Mayor who first noticed that the Ancient Greek stories of the griffin (which had the body of a lion, head and claws of an eagle, tail of a serpent) perfectly described a Protoceratops. The Greeks believed that the griffin guarded treasures of gold. Mayor discovered that fossilized skulls of Protoceratops were often found in Mongolia, where the Greeks traveled to trade for gold.”
― Ian Lendler, The First Dinosaur: How Science Solved the Greatest Mystery on Earth