Living fossil is an informal term for any living species (or clade) of organism which appears to be the same as a species otherwise only known from fossils and which has no close living relatives. These species have all survived major extinction events, and generally retain low taxonomic diversities. A species which successfully radiates (forming many new species after a possible genetic bottleneck) has become too successful to be considered a "living fossil".
Famous quotes containing the words living and/or fossil:
“At bottom there is in Joyce a profound hatred for humanity—the scholar’s hatred. One realizes that he has the neurotic’s fear of entering the living world, the world of men and women in which he is powerless to function. He is in revolt not against institutions, but against mankind.... Ulysses is like a vomit spilled by a delicate child whose stomach has been overloaded with sweetmeats.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)