There was a large box from Bellevue Literary Press waiting for me when I returned home from New Haven last night. Inside were 10 finished copies of Written in Stone, my first book and the culmination of four years of work. I had not spent all of that time writing it – it was only 18 months ago that the book began to take shape – but the seemingly endless hours spent boning up on paleontology and blogging stories about fossils precipitated the idea-rich “primordial soup” from which the more derived book idea eventually emerged.

To some extent, Written in Stone is a product