Prior to spending my life crouched over a keyboard and talking to Brian, I was originally trained as a geologist.
It was a cool job initially, and meant that I got to travel all over the UK and Ireland, see bits of the world that few others saw, and even hang off a cliff sometimes on a rope.
But, one of the most fascinating areas of Geology is in the south west of the UK, which includes the counties of Devon and Cornwall. I am from Devon, my wife is Cornish.
Devon though is the only county in the world that has had a geological period named after it. Most people know of the Jurassic through films like Jurassic park, or perhaps the Creatacious period when dinosaurs truly ruled the earth. But there's also the Devonian which is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic Era. This period spans from the end of the Silurian (about 420 million years ago), to the beginning of the Carboniferous (about 360 million years ago).
It is named after Devon, England, as this was the area where rocks from this period were first studied.
As far as life on Earth is concerned, it was the time when free-sporing plants began to spread across dry land, later evolving into seed-bearing plants. And, in the seas, fish became very diverse leading the Devonian to often be dubbed the Age of Fish.
Devon is also the only county in the UK with two coasts, north and south. It's a pretty cool place, and I count myself as privileged to have grown up here, and give my kids the same chance.