Ken McNamara

For at least half a million years, people have been doing some very strange things with fossils. Long before a few 17th-century minds started to decipher their true, organic nature, fossils had been eaten, dropped in goblets of wine, buried with the dead, adorned on bodies, and even used to try and cause harm. What triggered such curious behaviour was...

Unearthing the Underworld reveals the hidden world of rocks, the secret-keepers of past environments, of changing climates, and the pulse of life over billions of years. Even the most seemingly ordinary stone can tell us much about the history of this planet, opening vistas of ancient worlds of ice, raging floods, strange, unbreathable atmospheres, and prehistoric worlds teeming with life....

In 1909, a rich accumulation of many thousands of bones was excavated from Mammoth Cave in Australia's south-west. Many of the bones far exceeded in size any modern-day native mammal, evidence that in prehistoric times giant mammals had roamed the Australian bush. They included a marsupial the size of a buffalo, kangaroos more than two metres tall, wallabies much bigger...