Thanks
I am very grateful to my wife, Sue Radford, and my children, Jamie, Katie and Tim McNamara, for reading the book and gently telling me when I was getting too fanciful with my writing. Thanks to Marcus Good for help with websites. Thanks to Sarah Brenan for her very careful and perceptive editing of the manuscript, and for finding such a talented artist as Andrew Plant, who clearly sees ancient life in the same way that I do. I am also grateful to Cheryl Silcox and the students of Helena Valley...
hot air Animals had conquered the
skies. The first to do this were insects. The earliest insects were very similar to silverfish. Silverfish are those shiny little insects that you sometimes see scurrying out from under a book or some old paper. They can't fly, so they are easy to catch. But you try catching a fly or a dragonfly. It zips past you so fast you can hardly see it. The insects that took to the air were better able to escape their predators. Some of the earliest insects got very, very big. This would have also helped...
Tracking trails and traces
of animal activity. Not all fossils are parts of a creature, like bones or shells. Some, such as dinosaur footprints, or the trails left in the sand by some little worm, are trace fossils. If your daffodil bed somehow amazingly got preserved for million of years and turned into rock, then the cat's diggings would be a trace fossil. They may not tell us much about what the animals looked like, but trace fossils tell us a lot about how they behaved. No, I don't mean whether they were good or bad,...
Then one of evolutions miracles
occurred. Fish began to grow bony jaws, and these coats of teeth moved from covering the fish's body to living in their bigger mouths. Now the teeth could be used for biting. With strong jaws and pointed teeth, these new fish became predators, feeding on smaller, toothless fish, and probably on prawn-like crustaceans. One thing these early fish still didn't have was a real backbone. They did have one of sorts. But the trouble was that instead of being made of hard bone, like your leg or arm...
Trilobite biscuits
There is another reason why one type of animal that lived at this time is often found fossilised. And that's because of how it grew. These animals were trilobites. They were once very common, but they all died out became extinct about 250 million years ago. This is about where your fingers join on to your hand, just before the first dinosaurs appeared on Earth. Trilobites belong in the same group as insects, spiders, crabs and prawns - the arthropods. All these types of animals have 'segmented'...
Gogo fish
The best examples of fossil fish anywhere in the world are in Australia, in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. These are called the Gogo fish. You probably imagine that collecting fossils is all about hitting a rock as hard as you can with a hammer and hoping that it breaks in half to reveal a fossil. Well, that's how fossils are usually found. But it's a lot harder to get the best out of the Gogo fish. The fossilised bone is locked inside a hard lump of limestone rock. If you hammer...
Sail of the century
These mammal-like reptiles spread right across a single great land mass called Pangaea, between 320 and 220 million years ago. We've finally arrived at your fingers. One of the first mammal-like reptiles was one of the most peculiar. Known as Dimetrodon, it was about the size of a dog, but with shorter, stubby legs, like a crocodile. The really odd thing was the huge, fin-like sail on its back. Extremely long, thin spines stuck up from the animal's backbones. Between them was a thin membrane,...
Digging for fossil worms
Let's go back to Tuesday 31 August 1909. A man was looking for fossil trilobites high in the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia in Canada. His name was Charles Doolite Walcott, and with the help of his wife and son he had been finding trilobites in this area for some years. As Mrs Walcott was riding along a narrow track on a steep mountainside, her horse suddenly stumbled on a large rock. Walcott jumped off his horse and smacked the rock hard with his hammer. Inside were the fossilised remains...