“Yes, I am of old family, and not illiterate. I am a fossil."   "A which?"   "Fossil. The first horses were fossils. They date back two million years.”

“Most people walk along the beach hoping to find a fossilized Megalodon shark’s tooth or something. But not me. I walk along hoping to find a fossilized pirate with a fossilized wooden leg, for my collection, which I’ll start once I find the first one.”

“To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love”

“The boy who was taken," she said. "Is he your son?""How old do you think I am, Dweller?""I'm a little shaky on the fossil record, but I'd say fifty to sixty thousand years.""Eighteen. And no. He's not my son.”

“My contract had specified only that I 'should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda,' which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: 'Amuse yourself--for money.”

“No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... 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.”