Fossils: Messages from Deep Time

The past has left us messages-but they are written in bone, stone, footprints and fragments.

Long before humans existed, countless organisms lived, moved, fed, grew and disappeared. Most left no trace at all. A fortunate few became part of the fossil record, preserving clues that allow scientists to reconstruct worlds no human being ever witnessed.

In Fossils: Messages from Deep Time, readers will discover how bones, teeth, shells, leaves, footprints, eggs, pollen and even fossilised waste survive across immense spans of time. They will follow palaeontologists as they search for promising rocks, record discoveries in the field, protect fragile specimens and reveal them carefully in museum laboratories.

The journey continues inside fossils themselves. Modern scans, microscopes, chemical analysis and dating methods can expose hidden embryos, ancient diets, growth patterns and vanished environments. Readers will learn how scientists rebuild extinct animals from incomplete skeletons, place fossils on the tree of life and distinguish firm evidence from reasonable interpretation.

They will also see why scientific reconstructions change. New fossils can correct an old mistake, move a species to another evolutionary branch or transform our understanding of how an animal looked and lived. Far from weakening science, these revisions show how evidence makes knowledge stronger.

Serious, vivid and accessible, this final volume in the Before Humans series reveals not simply what lived in the prehistoric past, but how we can know anything about it at all.