The Cambrian Code

Dr. Hannah Lim went to China to excavate trilobites. She uncovered a 518-million-year-old eye that could overturn 150 years of evolutionary theory, if she lives long enough to show anyone. The fossil in the Chengjiang mudstone is a fully formed compound eye with its calcite lenses still intact. The rock beneath it holds no simpler eye and no precursor. Fourteen animal body plans appear at once in the same layers, and Hannah's math says random mutation couldn't have built them in the time the rocks allow. She has spent her career keeping faith and science in separate rooms. Her grandmother prayed before sunrise every morning, and Hannah quit church the week she left for Berkeley. Now the evidence is forcing a question she thought she'd settled years ago. The Order of St. Darwin wants it buried. For more than a century, this secret society has protected evolutionary theory as the foundation of secular civilization, and two members of Hannah's dig crew are already dead. Hannah has to smuggle the fossils out of China and across two continents to a scientific congress in Vienna, by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway in winter. She travels with a colleague she can't trust and a scientist who has spent twenty years arguing the other side, while her mentor waits in Vienna with answers that keep arriving a little too fast. The rocks have been speaking for 518 million years. Someone is willing to kill to keep the world from listening. Each book in The Signature Series can be read on its own, in any order. The Cambrian Code is Book 2 of The Signature Series. Four Mysteries. One Designer.