Man has always been fascinated by fossils, but it is only relatively recently that we have begun to appreciate fully what they can actually tell us about our world. Scattered across eternity, the fossil record is our only tangible link to the measureless tracts of Deep Time which precede the advent of humankind.
Perhaps predictably, the way fossils have been interpreted and classified in the past often tells us more about the political and moral agendas of the personalities involved than it does about prehistory. But it is to these larger-than-life personalities - from Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope battling it out in the wildernesses of nineteenth-century Wyoming right up to the feuds of scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins today - that we owe our knowledge about the origins of life on earth.
Richard Corfield's authoritative but accessible account takes us on an incredible journey, from the beginnings of palaeontology to the cutting edge of research today. Along the way, he shows us just why it is that the subject matters so much and what we can learn by looking back across eternity.
