A fossil, writes Jasper Burns, is first of all a thing of remarkable beauty. The sense of awe and exhilaration so many of us feel in the presence of the Ocean, or the Pyramids, or the Great Wall of China comes to me when I find a broken shell that's a million years oldNothing in nature can seem more mute than the stone impression of an organism whose kind disappeared half a billion years ago-yet almost nothing can be more eloquent if we have the...