I've worked all my life studying the fascinating ancient life of this planet as a palaeontologist. It's taken me to many places including 4 expeditions to Antarctica. The photo above shows me at a site called Gogo in north-western Australia holding a new genus of fossil shark (Gogoselachus) that I'd just found minutes earlier! These days I spend as much of my time doing research on fossils as working as an author, and my latest book "The Secret History of Sharks-The Rise of the Oceans Most Fearsome Predators" is all about the 460 million year evolution of sharks, from tiny scales and teeth through to giant complete skeletons preserved in rare conditions, explaining how they survived all 5 of Earth's mass extinction events, and the challenges they are facing to survive today (2024, Ballantine Books, Penguin Random House, USA, and Quercus, UK, Australia). I narrated the audio book too.
