'It's a bad idea to burn your ancestors'
Jasper is Bone Boy, an obsessive fossil hunter.
He unearths a spectacular Jurassic 'Dragon Fish' fossil which befriends him in the spirit world.
Bone Boy discovers that The 'Grand Council of Fossil Elders'...
They call me 'bone boy' at school, and not in a good way.
They taunt me, point their fingers, and laugh when I pass.
One or two actually push me about, nothing too serious, yet.
Idiots!
Just because I've got a thing about fossil hunting, and not whatever it is they are into.
They'd treat me with more respect if they knew I now have the power to influence whether they live or die. Literally.
And not only them, but every single human living on planet earth.
For reasons I will never understand, I've been somehow chosen to decide the fate of humanity, and it's all because of my obsession with fossils.
What's not to get about fossils?
They are so much more than lumps of rock.
Each one tells a story.
Like travelling back 200 million years, to the Jurassic, before we humans were even a twinkle in evolution's eye.
Hunting fossils gives me a sense of perspective, of history, and the insignificance of my own tiny life. For me they are a passport to an ancient world I can taste, and feel.
They take me to the warm waters of the Jurassic, teeming with life from the tiniest starfish and ammonites to the great predator monsters of the deep.
The biggest and most dangerous dinosaurs that ever lived. My favourite is the Liopleurodon. It reached 25 meters with teeth the size of an axe.
Way more deadly than a T Rex!
How cool is that?
Sometimes I find myself daydreaming, imagining I'm swimming amongst these creatures, like I'm actually there.
It blows my mind!
So I'm a marine fossil nut. That's me. I'm weird, I know.
Of course, I keep all this, largely to myself.
Grandpa Bert, he understood me, and I caught the fossil bug off him when I was little.
We had great fossil hunting trips together. But Gramps died last year.
Just a bunch of bones six feet under. A bit like a fossil himself I suppose. No more hunts with him on the 'Jurassic Coast' in Dorset where they live, or in his case, lived.
Looking back, the whole crazy story all started innocently enough on the first February Half Term after lockdown down there to visit Gran.
Downside; I'd probably freeze, and Mum and Adam would, without doubt drive me nuts.
Upside: I'd have my hammer, my chisels, and the Jurassic cliffs crammed full of Jurassic sea monsters.
Let the hunting begin.
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