Richard Fortey

"The trilobites, of course, overall have a fantastic variety of morphologies — fantastic variety of shapes. So you would expect them to have many different sorts of life habits."

"Fossil hunting was a slightly more esoteric pastime, but what is perhaps most telling about Fortey’s childhood was his awakening to s. Today there is a whole library of richly illustrated guides and scholarly works on mushrooms. The fungus foray is a popular activity offered for public participation up and down the country. Yet when Fortey did it there were no teachers and the only widely available book was The Observer’s Book of Common Fungi. It covered 200 of the many thousands of British species. Fungi, in short, are difficult. The author tells us he remains an amateur enthusiast, but it is a mark of his ability that he describes how, in 2006, he found a tiny fungus Ceriporiopsis herbicola new to science. The discovery of entirely unknown organisms happens to few, but it happens in Britain to almost none. You realise that a challenge in this funny and entertaining book is peeling back the curtain of the author’s self-deprecation."

"Collecting a pile of fossils is only the beginning. Many fossils are only fragments of the whole animal or plant. To piece together the whole organism is rather like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of the complete picture to work towards. Piece has to be added to piece, and the larger and more fragmentary the animal the more the result is in question. Not surprisingly mistakes have been made. The first reconstruction of the dinosaur Iguanodon finished up with its thumb on its nose!"

"I ought to introduce you to trilobites ... fossil arthropods distantly related to the s and s of today, but very distantly related — enormously diverse in the ... rocks ... with an evolutionary history of their own of several hundred millions of years ..."

"It was that did it for me. “Dr was an eccentric in the grand manner … he always wore hand-tooled cowboy boots with elaborate curlicues in the stitching and a hat and jacket to match. He was very shortsighted, and tended to stumble along in the purposeful way adopted by the cartoon character Mr Magoo, while mumbling vigorously to himself.” The Magoo lookalike also carries a whip and a six-shooter, but that is not what matters most about him: what matters is that he was an expert on the s of the . .. A book that starts with slimy things in the oceans and continues to the dawn of human civilisation in the must offer more than just a procession of challenging concepts and unfamiliar words, and accordingly up pops Mr Magoo, with whom Fortey (himself big on the trilobites of the Ordovician) once shared a hotel room."

"... Time piles rock upon rock. The sea comes and goes with the passing geological ages. Unless other events intervened, my trilobite would have become interred within an ever deeper pile of sediments, to a depth possibly beyond the deepest coal seam, and buried into an obscurity from which it would never emerge. But often in geology that which is buried is destined to rise. Phases of mountain building throw up rocks that were once deep beneath the surface. The British isles have been through no fewer than three such phases since my trilobite scuttled about on the sea floor. The first of these — the — was responsible for disinterring my fossil."