Swimming in Stone

Book excerpt: When David Attenborough filmed his ground-breaking series Life on Earth in 1978, he chose one place in the world to demonstrate the early evolution of fishes: Gogo. Gogo, in the wild Kimberly district of Western Australia, is one of the world's most significant fossil sites because it shows 375 million-year old fishes preserved in stunning three-dimensional preservation. These fossils provide a rare window into the anatomy of primitive fishes at the critical stage when fishes were starting to evolve into the first land animals the line ultimately leading to humans. Yet, despite being such an important fossil site, it has had a mysterious and checkered history of discovery. Written by paleontologist John Long, who has spent over 20 years searching and working the Gogo sites, Swimming in Stone tells the amazing stories of the people who discovered the fossils, the development of the chemical preparation methods that freed the old bones from their rocky tombs, and how the flood of new da