Man has always been fascinated by fossils, but it is only relatively recently that we have begun to appreciate fully what they actually tell us about the world. Scattered across eternity, the fossil record is our only clue to the vast tracts of "deep time" which precede the advent of humankind. Predictably, the way fossils have been interpreted in the past often tell us more about the personalities involved than it does about prehistory. But is through these personalities, from Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope battling it out in the wilderness of 19th-century Wyoming right up to the bitter feuds of scientists of the 21st-century, that in the end we have come to learn extraordinary things about the real origins of life on earth.