Finding fossils takes a combination of skill and luck. You have to be looking in the right place and have some idea of how to distinguish those precious pieces of prehistoric life from all the rock surrounding it. But that’s not all. How the sun hits stone, where your eyes fall along the outcrop, and even where you stop to take a leak can make all the difference between finding something amazing and passing it by. And that’s just in the field. Museum collections hold petrified trails of bread crumbs, too, leading to forgotten places whose fossiliferous potential hasn’t been realized.

Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, geology student Thomas Schröter was hiking through the red rocks of Algarve,