Very well said Dr. Holtz

While going through all of my e-mails today from this weekend, so tired must sleep, I was reading though an e-mail thread on the Dinosaur Mailing List that had a great quote from Dr. Tom Holtz. The question had been raised about what does the lay person need to know about paleontology and dinosaurs.

Summarizing the key points of the history of life over nearly 4 billion years of evolutionary history is a big task. After all, there is a tendency to focus on the spectacular and sensationalized rather than the ordinary and humdrum. As Stephen Jay Gould and others often remarked, from a purely objective external standpoint we have always lived in the Age of Bacteria, and the changing panoply of animals and plants during the last half-billion years have only been superficial changes.

But the question wasn’t “what should a dispassionate outsider regard as the modal aspect of the History of Life?”; it was “What should everyone know about paleontology?” Since we are terrestrial mammals of the latest Cenozoic, we have a natural interest in events on the land and during the most recent parts of Earth History. That is a fair bias: it does focus on who WE are and where WE come from.

The full post can be read in one of three places:
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week (SVPOW)
Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings
Superoceras