A Quote by Sy Montgomery

We split from our common ancestor with the octopus half a billion years ago. And yet, you can make friends with an octopus.

Sy Montgomery

Quote Topics

Ancestor Billion Common Friends Half Make Octopus Our Split Years Years Ago

Quote Author

Sy Montgomery
American - Writer

It's better to be an octopus than a fish. If an octopus loses a tentacle to a predator, the octopus will survive with seven tentacles left for itself.

Gene Simmons

If you're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals, you might as well pick one that's fairly common. And octopus are: they live in all the oceans. They also live deep. And I can't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep, but whatever the case, I like that.

Mike deGruy

Sometimes I pretend to be an octopus. But then people are like ‘Darren what’re you doing?’ And I just sit there and laugh because they’re not cool enough to be an octopus and I’m just like ‘Hah you’re just jealous because you’re not an octopus.’

Darren Criss

I heard one story about an octopus in a home tank who would get out, cruise around the house, take knick-knacks, and drag them back to its tank. Like a dog! They're so smart that there are octopus enrichment handbooks so you don't bore your octopus. I've seen them play with Legos, Mr. Potato Head, you name it!

Sy Montgomery

Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.

Richard Dawkins

If you go to the octopus, and if you're not too squeamish, dissect it. You'll find that it has a camera eye which is remarkable similar to our own. And yet we know that the octopus belongs to an invertebrate group called cephalopod mulluses, evolutionarily very distant indeed from the chordates to which we belong.

Simon Conway Morris

I put an octopus in aquarium, and it would eat the others. But if you put an octopus in with a school of tiny fish, he might not be able to catch them. That's an archetypal structure: a powerful individual versus the multitude, the crowd. You can relate to that.

Pierre Huyghe

With the exception of octopus, I don't think I've met any food that I didn't like. And by the way, sometimes I do like octopus. I'm just not crazy about it by itself. I love sea urchin. I love uni. If I'm going to die of anything, it's going to be gluttony.

Justin Timberlake

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor.

Agnes Repplier

When I would visit my octopus friend, Octavia, at New England aquarium, usually she would look me in the face, flow right over to see me, and flush red with emotion when she took my arms in hers. Often when I'd stroke her she'd turn white beneath my touch, the colour of a relaxed octopus.

Sy Montgomery

All indications are that three and a half billion years ago, Mars looked like Earth. It had lakes. It had rivers. It had river deltas. It had snow-capped peaks and puffy clouds and blue sky. Three and a half billion years ago, it was a happening place. The same time on Earth, that's when life started. So did life start on Mars?

John M. Grunsfeld

The US is also unusual in the enormous scale of religious fundamentalism. The impact on understanding of the world is extraordinary. In national polls almost half of those surveyed have reported that they believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago (or less) and that man shares no common ancestor with the ape. There are similar beliefs about the Second Coming.

Noam Chomsky

As commonly understood, creationism involves belief in an earth formed only about ten thousand years ago, an interpretation of the Bible that is still very popular. For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.

Michael Behe

When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old. Now scientists say it's four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion.