Prologue : Stone Crazy. No place with no past
The Tao of Earth. The department of redundancy department, Inertia and spare parts
Going home to Mother Earth
Everything old is new again
Reading rocks: a primer. Meeting rocks on common ground
Grammar and syntax of the three rock languages
Mind the gap, what rocks don't tell us
Putting everything in order
Peering into the primordial mists
The great and the small. Geo-metry: Sizing up the Earth
The importance of being erroneous
Making retroactive measurements
Stretchy coastlines and imperial microbes
Mixing and sorting. Stars of rock and heavy metal
Mixed drinks and metaphors
Innovation and conservation. You say you want a revolution
Swimming with the (not-yet-evolved) sharks
An arthropod eat arthropod world
The many legs of the arms race
Something old, something new, everything borrowed
Strength and weakness. Earth before geology
Naming names and making maps
The incredible shrinking Earth
Epilogue: The once and future Earth.
