WHILE fluffy dinosaurs steal the limelight, we need to remind ourselves that there is more to fossils than agreeing whether or not Tyrannosaurus rex could run. Not that I have anything against dinosaurs, but the fossil record is still largely untapped. Far fewer than 0.1 per cent of existing fossils have been recovered from the rocks. The trouble is we probably know more about the evolution of extinct trilobites than we do about human evolution.
First we need to understand the historical and environmental context of fossils. Regional or continental syntheses of geology might not be particularly trendy. Most geologists…
