Second edition of the Fossil Book adds more color and locations to the content

Kirk Johnson and Ray Troll met in the late 1980s, not knowing that their respective skills would lead them to travel over 5,000 miles across the country to write a book on fossil science.

Johnson, a paleontologist, came up with the idea for Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway because, as a scientist, he wanted to find a way to represent his interests in a humorous yet interesting way, and Troll, an artist, was able to help represent his issues across the United States in a cartoonish way.

After working together on a road trip, the two managed to put Johnson's knowledge on paper so that other people could share it.

“He immediately has an expert at his side and I have an artist, and we're both experiencing the same thing,” Johnson said. “I talk about what it is, he imagines how he would imagine it, and the result is this book.”

The book, originally published in 2007, covered their fossil-hunting trip along the West Coast and through Wyoming, Colorado and neighboring states, including Washington, where they visited museums, fossil sites, national parks and other places where fossils might be found, he said.

Sometimes the couple would show up in a town and find someone with a fossil collection.

“Once we got going, we found it was a really fun way to travel. We would just get in the truck and drive off for two weeks without a real itinerary,” Johnson said. “We could take a detour or stay in one place longer, and it was a really fun way to travel because we never really knew what we were going to find… It was like an open-ended treasure hunt that we did for years.”

The second edition of “Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway,” released in June and covering 18 states, includes further explorations of Eastern Washington and the Spokane area, he said.

Johnson said while traveling through the area, they found Blue Lake Rhino, a cave in Coulee City where a rhinoceros was trapped during a volcanic eruption millions of years ago. The lava activity caused the cave to take on the shape of a rhinoceros.

Another adventure in Spokane was visiting a 15 million year old fossil site near Clarkia, Idaho, where they found leaves that were millions of years old but still had their green color.

By traveling to different parts of the country to find these fossils, Johnson and Troll were able to create an opportunity to experience the fossils like never before.

“We've never had a professional paleontologist and a professional artist in the car at the same time, and we were just driving around learning,” Johnson said. “It just worked really well.”

Many people don't have the opportunity to see fossils the way this duo did on their trip, so the goal of the book is to open people's eyes to what types of fossils there are in this country and where to find them, he said.

Johnson said he knows kids love fossils and dinosaurs and other children's books about fossils aren't as colorful, so he saw the book as a way to spark young people's interest in science while also being visually appealing.

The new book includes many illustrations and information about the new places they visited, he said. Although they visited many new areas, they drew on people and places from the original publication, but new fossils were found and things had changed for the better.

“It's really a different book than the first one, and Ray's art evolves quite a bit as well,” he said.

Troll is a lifelong artist who began drawing at the age of five, and creating art during the 5,000-mile journey was unique for him as he had never experienced work like this before.

“I created art based on our shared experiences and he wrote. We did it all pretty independently, so we ended up creating quite a bit of art and I did a lot of improvising,” Troll said. “I'd like to call myself a visual artist… So I followed my artistic interests and mixed them with science to create art.”

During production of the second book, Troll said, the couple worked hard to add more color to the book and bring in many aspects from Washington state to make the content more diverse. But the inspiration for this new book came to them when they were researching fossils across the state and realized they had gathered enough information to republish it 16 years later.

Troll said that while he hopes the book and the information and artwork it contains will help people learn about fossils and become interested in the science, the experience also helped him better understand the information provided.

“I learned a lot along the way, and I guess Kirk learned something about what it's like to travel with an artist, but it was so incredibly inspiring to go to the actual fossil sites … and just be so inspired that I felt the urge to make drawings,” he said.