"Each species of mammal-like reptile that has been found appears suddenly in the fossil record and is not preceded by the species that is directly ancestral to it. It disappears some time later, equally abruptly, without leaving a directly descended species although we usually find that it has been replaced by some new, related species." (Kemp, Tom, "The Reptiles that Became Mammals," New Scientist, Vol. 92, 1982, p.583.)

"At the core of punctuated equilibria lies an empirical observation: once evolved, species tend to remain remarkably stable, recognizable entities for millions of years. The observation is by no means new, nearly every paleontologist who reviewed Darwin's Origin of Species pointed to his evasion of this salient feature of the fossil record. But stasis was conveniently dropped as a feature of life's history to he reckoned with in evolutionary biology." (Eldredge, Niles, Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria, 1985, p.188.)

"It is, indeed, a very curious state of affairs, I think, that paleontologists have been insisting that their record is consistent with slow, steady, gradual evolution where I think that privately, they’ve known for over a hundred years that such is not the case. ...It’s the only reason why they can correlate rocks with their fossils, for instance. ...They’ve ignored the question completely." (Eldredge, Niles, "Did Darwin Get It Wrong?" Nova (November 1, 1981), 22 p. 6.)

"The record certainly did not reveal gradual transformations of structure in the course of time. On the contrary, it showed that species generally remained constant throughout their history and were replaced quite suddenly by significantly different forms. New types or classes seemed to appear fully formed, with no sign of an evolutionary trend by which they could have emerged from an earlier type." (Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 1984, p. 187.)

"Paleontologists have paid an enormous price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study. ...The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’" (Gould, Stephen J. The Panda’s Thumb, 1980, p. 181-182.)

"Paleontologists are traditionally famous (or infamous) for reconstructing whole animals from the debris of death. Mostly they cheat. ...If any event in life’s history resembles man’s creation myths, it is this sudden diversification of marine life when multicellular organisms took over as the dominant actors in ecology and evolution. Baffling (and embarrassing) to Darwin, this event still dazzles us and stands as a major biological revolution on a par with the invention of self-replication and the origin of the eukaryotic cell. The animal phyla emerged out of the Precambrian mists with most of the attributes of their modern descendants." (Bengtson, Stefan, "The Solution to a Jigsaw Puzzle," Nature, vol. 345 (June 28, 1990), pp. 765-766.)

"Beginning at the base of the Cambrian period and extending for about 10 million years, all the major groups of skeletonized invertebrates made their first appearance in the most spectacular rise in diversity ever recorded on our planet." (Salvador E. Luria, Stephen Jay Gould, Sam Singer, A View of Life, 1981, p.649.)

"And it has been the paleontologist my own breed who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: .... We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not." (Niles Eldredge, Columbia Univ., American Museum Of Natural History, Time Frames, 1986, p.144.)

"Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin’s post ulate of gradualism...and the actual findings of paleontology. Following phyletic lines through time seemed to reveal only minimal gradual changes but no clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin of an evolutionary novelty. Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil record." (Mayr, E. One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought, 1991, p. 138.)

"In spite of these examples, it remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all new categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences." (Simpson, George Gaylord, The Major Features of Evolution, 1953, p. 360.)

"Stepping way back and looking at too broad a scale, one might discern some sort of progress in life’s history. ...But the pattern dissolves upon close inspection. Most structural complexity entered in a grand burst at the Cambrian explosion, and the history of Phanerozoic life since then has largely been a tale of endless variation upon a set Bauplane. We may discern a few ‘vectors’ of directional change - thickening and ornamentation of shells...--but these are scarcely the stuff of progress in its usual sense. ...I believe our inability to find any clear vector of fitfully accumulating progress...represents our greatest dilemma for a study of pattern in life’s history." (Gould, Stephen J., "The Paradox of the First Tier: an Agenda for Paleobiology," Paleobiology, 1985, p. 3.)

"The fossil record is much less incomplete than is generally accepted." (Paul, C.R.C, "The Adequacy of the Fossil Record," 1982, p. 75.)

"Enthusiastic paleontologists in several countries have claimed pieces of this missing record, but the claims have all been disputed and in any case do not provide real connections. That brings me to the second most surprising feature of the fossil record...the abruptness of some of the major changes in the history of life." (Ager, D., The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, 1981, p. 20.)

"The fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy. Nothing distressed him more than the Cambrian explosion, the coincident appearance of almost all complex organic designs..." (Gould, Stephen J., The Panda’s Thumb, 1980, p. 238-239.)

"Most families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed ancestors." (Eldredge, Niles, Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks, 1989, p. 22.)

"If evolution could produce ten new Cambrian phyla and then wipe them out just as quickly, then what about the surviving Cambrian groups? Why should they have had a long and honorable Pre-cambrian pedigree? Why should they not have originated just before the Cambrian, as the fossil record, read literally, seems to indicate, and as the fast-transition theory proposes? This argument, of course, is a death knell for the artifact theory." (Gould, Stephen J., Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, 1989, p. 273.)

"...one of the most striking and potentially embarrassing features of the fossil record. The majority of major groups appear suddenly in the rocks, with virtually no evidence of transition from their ancestors." (Futuyma, D., Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution, 1983, p. 82.)

"Modern multicellular animals make their first uncontested appearance in the fossil record some 570 million years ago - and with a bang, not a protracted crescendo. This ‘Cambrian explosion’ marks the advent (at least into direct evidence) of virtually all major groups of modern animals - and all within the minuscule span, geologically speaking, of a few million years." (Gould, Stephen J., Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, 1989, p. 23-24.)

"All through the fossil record, groups - both large and small - abruptly appear and disappear. ...The earliest phase of rapid change usually is undiscovered, and must be inferred by comparison with its probable relatives." (Newell, N. D., Creation and Evolution: Myth or Reality, 1984, p. 10.)

"The gaps in the record are real, however. The absence of any record of any important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods, species seldom and genera never show evolution into new species or genera but replacement or one by another, and change is more or less abrupt." (Wesson, R., Beyond Natural Selection, 1991, p. 45.)

"Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin's time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. And it is not always clear, in fact it's rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find." (Raup, David M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, vol. 50, 1979, p. 23.)

“Unfortunately, the origins of most higher categories are shrouded in mystery; commonly new higher categories appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional ancestral forms.” (Raup, D. M. and Stanley, S. M., Principles of Paleontology, 1971, p. 306.)

“The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for gradual change, and the principle of natural selection does not require it -- selection can operate rapidly.” (Gould, Stephen J., "The Return of Hopeful Monsters," Natural History 86, 1977, p.22.)