My home state rock, the honeycombed Petoskey stone (as it turns out, a fossilized extinct rugose coral, Hexagonaria percarinata), littered the Great Lakes and my 2nd-grade rock collection. In Kansas City, Missouri I bicycled a city of limestone ledges while studying painting and writing. I biked the flat sea of cornfields while studying botanical illustration at the Illinois Natural Survey—where, notably, an Entomologist kindly magnified a pretty bryozoan I brought in, confirming my fondness for fossils. Animal bones, shells, and rocks became my keys to learning about other histories. Marine coral colonies, trilobites, and bryozoans are still some of my favorite things to draw, and sweeter still to stumble on outdoors. Rough mineralized fossils remind us where we come from and that we will go back to the mud.