Leverhulme Research Fellow Dr Thomas Halliday is the prose winner of the 2017–2018 Hugh Miller Writing Competition. This competition aims to honour the geologist Hugh Miller (1802-1856) by inspiring new, original prose and poetry on the theme of Scotland’s rich fossil heritage. Thomas described his winning piece as follows:

"Southern Scotland has produced some of the most exciting and earliest tetrapod fossils - the earliest vertebrate groups to make the move from the water to the land. My piece, Landward, was about one of these: the specimen of Casineria, the earliest known amniote. It was found nearly thirty years ago on the intertidal part of a sheltered beach looking out into the Firth of Forth, not far from the isle of Fidra, the inspiration behind Stevenson's Treasure Island. Fitting Casineria precisely into a category is not easy - it's on the borderline between fully land-dwelling descendants and amphibious ancestors, a theme which I thought fitted well with the present and ancient landscapes of the Lothians."

You can read more about the competition, and Thomas’s winning entry, here.