![]() ![]() ![]() On a visit to blustery Newfoundland to examine some slabs of sediment laid down more than 500 million years ago, he notes a sign instructing visitors to “remove footwear before visiting fossil bearing surfaces.” “I confess,” he writes, “that the idea of taking off one’s boots in a howling squall to safeguard fossils that had survived since the Precambrian had its funny side.” Or, on learning that the lamprey was still to be found on the menu in Lithuania, he “trotted around the cobbled, sloping streets” of Vilnius, looking for a restaurant that served this primitive fish. But he is also alive to the absurdities that crop up in the course of his quest. We accompany him to the hot springs of Yellowstone, where he examines organisms even more archaic than those growing in the tepid West Australian seas, and up into the Sierra de Tramontana in Mallorca to look for something called a ferreret, aka the Mallorcan midwife toad.įortey’s descriptions of these places are charming little exercises in travel writing and constitute one of the great pleasures of the book. Thus, we travel with him to New Zealand to examine a segmented creature called the velvet worm (which turns out to be neither velvety nor exactly wormlike), as well as a lizard-like reptile known as the tuatara whose closest kin was last seen in the Triassic. Here, the author sets himself the task of visiting the home of each of the “living fossils” he has chosen to represent a particular period of deep time. ![]()
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