The problem of the apes is not a shortage of money, it is a shortage of strategy. Let us devote our minds... the one thing we have more of than other apes... and let's secure their future.
Richard LeakeyIn the area of species protection, we should concern ourselves with what is right as opposed to what might be easier, or popular in the short term.
Richard LeakeyPrimates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well.
Richard LeakeyWhen out fossil hunting, it is very easy to forget that rather than telling you how the creatures lived, the remains you find indicate only where they became fossilized.
Richard LeakeyThe whole story is about change. We are very lucky that the earth's history is recorded in fossilized remains. And we can see the changes. Unfortunately, there will always be gaps in our knowledge, but there is no doubt that we and everything living today has evolved.
Richard LeakeyIt has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.
Richard Leakey