📚 Fossils

30 works · ordered by editions in print

Lives kept in stone: how fossils form, how they are dated, and the archive paleontology reads like a text.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject fossils in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Title	Author	First published	Editions
Wonderful Life the Burgess	Stephen Jay Gould	1988	23
Fossil (DK Eyewitness Books)	Paul D. Taylor	1990	21
Eyewitness Dinosaur	David Norman	1989	19
Organic remains of a former world	James Parkinson	1804	18
The foot-prints of the Creator	Hugh Miller	1849	18
Fósiles	Richard Spilsbury	2011	18
Fossils	Frank Harold Trevor Rhodes	1962	13
The Past in Perspective	Kenneth L. Feder	1995	13
Invertebrate Palaeontology and Evolution	E. N. K. Clarkson	1979	11
Fossils	Chris Pellant	1994	10
Fossils	Douglas Palmer	1996	10
Trilobite	Richard A. Fortey	2000	10
Fossils at a glance	Clare Milsom	2003	10
Fossils	Richard A. Fortey	1982	9
Prehistoric Life (DK Eyewitness)	William Lindsay	1994	9
The fossil book	Carroll Lane Fenton	1958	8
Rock and gem	Ra Bonewitz	2005	8
Wild and Woolly Mammoths	Aliki	1977	7
Digging up dinosaurs	Aliki	1981	7
Fossils Tell Stories	Yu-Ri Kim	2014	7
Dinosaur!	David Norman	1991	6
Fossils (Smithsonian Handbooks)	David Ward	1992	6
Hunting Dinosaurs	Louie Psihoyos	1994	6
Beasts of Eden	David Rains Wallace	2003	6
Fossils	Rebecca Faulkner	2007	6
Scary Dinosaurs You Wouldnt Want To Meet	Carolyn Franklin Scrace	2010	6
How did we find out about dinosaurs?	Isaac Asimov	1973	5
Monster Bones	Jacqui Bailey	2004	5
Rocks and Fossils	Chris Pellant	2006	5
Written in stone	Riley Black	2010	5

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.