Leverhulme Research Fellow wins Hugh Miller Writing Competition

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.