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 our 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 tells us more about the personalities involved than it does about prehistory. But it is through these personalities, from Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope battling it out in the wildernesses of nineteenth-century Wyoming right up to the bitter feuds of scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins today, that in the end we have come to learn extraordinary things about the real origins of life on earth.