Rocks are full of stories. They contain the petrified remains of long-dead animals and in every fossilised bone, scale and track, there are awe-inspiring accounts of the history of life on this planet. Of course, fossils themselves are poor narrators. To uncover their tales, you need a storyteller with an expert’s knowledge and a writer’s flair. Brian Switek is that storyteller.

In his first book, Written in Stone, Switek uses the remains of prehistoric creatures to illustrate how the first tetrapods (four-legged animals) invaded the land from the sea, how the ancestors of whales went back to the sea from the land, and how a special branch of the dinosaur family eventually took to the air as birds. This is thrilling