Second release of fossil book adds more color and locations to content

Kirk Johnson and Ray Troll met in the late 1980s, unknowing that each other’s skills would take them over 5,000 miles throughout the country to create a book about fossil education.

Johnson, a paleontologist, got the idea for “Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway” because, as a scientist, he wanted to find a way to show what his interests in a way that is humorous but interesting at the same time, and Troll, an artist, was able to help portray his expenditures throughout the United States in a cartoonish way.

So, after collaborating on a road trip, the two were able to create to put Johnson’s knowledge onto a piece of paper for other people to enjoy.

“He gets an instant expert sitting next to him and I get an instant artist, and the two of us experience the same thing,” Johnson said. “I’ll talk about what it is, he’ll imagine how he would image is, and the result is this book.”

The original publication of the book was in 2007 and covered the fossil searching trip they took along the West Coast and through Wyoming, Colorado and their neighboring states, including Washington, where they visited museums, fossil sites, national parks and other locations people might encounter fossils, he said.

Sometimes, the pair would show up to a town and were able to find someone with a fossil collection.

“Once we got in the groove, we found it was a really fun way to travel around. We would just get in the truck and go for two weeks, and we wouldn’t have a real itinerary,” Johnson said. “We could take a diversion or spend longer at a place and that was a really fun way to travel because we never really knew what we were going to find … It’s like an open-ended treasure hunt that we kept doing for years.”

The second copy of “ Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway,” which was released in June and covers 18 states, includes more exploration of Eastern Washington and the Spokane area, he said.

Johnson said while going through the area, they were able to find the Blue Lake Rhino, a Coulee City cave where a rhinoceros millions of years ago was trapped when a volcano erupted, and the lava activity caused the cave to form a rhino shape.

Another adventure in Spokane included visiting a 15-million-year-old fossil site near Clarkia, Idaho, where they were able to find 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 a way of experiencing the fossils that had not been done 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 to learn,” Johnson said. “It just worked really well.”

A lot of people don’t get the chance to see fossils the way this duo was able to on the trip, so the goal of the book was to open people’s eyes to what kind of fossils are out in the country and where, he said.

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

The new book added a lot of illustrations and information from the new places they visited, he said. While they went to a lot of new areas, they checked back in with people and places from the original publication, but new fossils had been found and things had changed in a good way.

“It really is a different book than the first time around, and Ray’s art also evolves quite a bit,” he said.

Troll is a lifelong artist who began drawing at 5 years old, and creating art during the 5000-mile trip was unique for him because he had never experienced a job like this one before.

“I was creating art based on our experiences together and he was writing. We did that all pretty independently, so I ended up with a whole lot of art and I was improvising a lot,” Troll said. “I’d like to think of myself as a fine artist … So I was pursuing my artistic interests and infusing it science to create art.”

During the production for the second book, Troll said the pair worked hard to add more color to it alongside a lot of aspects from the state of Washington to diversify the content, but the inspiration behind this new book happened when they were exploring fossils throughout the state and realized they had collected enough information to publish again 16 years later.

Troll said while he hopes the book, and the information and art it provides, helps people learn about fossils and become interested in the science, the experience helped him learn about the information provided as well.

“I was learning along the way, and I guess Kirk was learning about traveling with an artist, but it was so tremendously inspiring to go to the actual fossil sites … and just be so inspired that I’m driven to want to create drawings,” he said.