The atlas · Back through time
Fossils and extinction
How life gets into the rocks, and how it vanishes.
2 written · 10 in outline · 3 sections
Fossils
- Fossils
Almost everything that ever lived left no trace. How the rest got into the rocks, and the girl from Lyme Regis who dug them out.
- Trace fossils
Footprints, burrows and droppings: fossils of what animals did, not what they were.
- Where soft bodies survive
The rare places where skin, guts and feathers were preserved, such as the Burgess Shale.
- Fossil hunting in Britain
Where and how to look for fossils safely, and the rules about what you can keep.
- Britain’s great fossil sites
The sites that made British palaeontology, on a map and in time.
Palaeontology
- The first fossil hunters
Mary Anning, Gideon Mantell, William Buckland and the start of palaeontology.
Mass extinctions
- Mass extinctions
Five times, most life on Earth has died in a geological instant. What the rocks say happened, and what is happening now.
- The end-Ordovician extinction
The first of the five great extinctions, and its link to a short ice age.
- The Late Devonian extinction
A long, drawn-out crisis in the sea, and the debate over its cause.
- The end-Permian extinction
The worst of the great extinctions, and the Siberian volcanoes thought to lie behind it.
- The end-Triassic extinction
The extinction that cleared the way for the dinosaurs.
- The end-Cretaceous extinction
The asteroid, the volcanoes, and why only the bird dinosaurs survived.