Sea urchins are older than dinosaurs?

This question began our family’s journey to research the incredible story of how life evolved on our planet over the last 3.8 billion years. After receiving a 73-million-year-old echinoid fossil from friends living on the English coast, we were intrigued. We poured over science journals, read textbooks, and visited natural history museums to create an evolutionary tree of life set to geological time that gave us the answer. And yes, sea urchins, like the ones our children found in Maine tidal pools, are older than dinosaurs by millions of years!

Suddenly everything alive had a story to be discovered–a story of survival, relationships, adaptations, and extinctions. The chickadee on the birdfeeder is the result of millions of years of evolution through an ancestral line of dinosaurs. The snail in the garden has shelled ancestors that survived five mass extinctions. Grass is a relatively recent result of flowering plant diversity and is closely related to pineapples!

Wanting to share the wonder of these stories often buried in science journals, we created products that combine the amazing scientific advances in the understanding of our world’s biodiversity with the detailed artwork of 19th century naturalists and our own watercolors.

We invite you to join the journey.