From microorganisms to elephants and dinosaurs, a new book investigates Earth’s excavators.

The average person looks at Stone Mountain and sees a solid, unmoving block. Thinking about geologic time, Emory paleontologist Anthony Martin sees something akin to a giant sugar cube.

Ever since the crystallized mass of minerals born in puddles rose from the depths of the earth, propelled by the spewing magma that formed the Blue Ridge Mountains some 350 million years ago, the giant rock’s flankers have faced constant assault—and not just from weather and water.

Stone Mountain “is fighting a battle against life, and life is winning,” Martin writes in the introduction to his new book, Life Sculpted: Tales of the Animals, Plants, and Fungi That Puncture, Break, and Scrape to Shape the Earth.

The University of Chicago Press publishes “Life Sculpted” on June 2, marking the release of the fifth book in the past 10 years by Martin, Professor of Practice in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory.

Martin is a geologist and paleontologist who focuses primarily on ichthyology – the study of traces of life such as tracks, burrows, nests, and tooth marks. Among his finds are the only known dinosaur burrows and the oldest traces of birds in Australia. Another of his passions is great science communication, which his books embody.

Life Sculpted is the follow-up to Martin’s 2017 book Evolution Underground: Burrows, Hideaways, and the Wonderful Underground World Beneath Our Feet. The current volume, also aimed at anyone interested in Earth sciences, goes beyond excavation to cover how countless life forms have broken down the solid substrates of rock, shells, bone, and wood over the past billion years.

“Yes, life can be hard,” says Martin, “but life also makes everything less difficult every day. Biological erosion shapes the world, literally. It has changed entire ecosystems. ”

Biological erosion has also changed human history. Martin cites the wood-boring clams that perforated the hull of the Spanish fleet, which helped turn the odds toward the English navy in 1588, when it won a decades-long battle for naval dominance.

Biorods come in all sizes, he wrote, from microbes that ferry calcium away from rocks and shells to elephants that dig caves with their tusks for salt.

Bioeroders can change the soundscape as well as the landscape.

In a chapter titled “Your Beach Is Made of Parrotfish,” Martin describes hearing “a crackle and pop reminiscent of sugary breakfast cereal meets milk” while snorkeling over coral reefs in the Bahamas.

He explains that the grinding is actually the sound of parrotfish gnawing off pieces of coral with jaws and teeth capable of crushing rocks. Coral reefs and the surrounding shallow marine environments were shaped over millions of years by these reef-gnawing fish and pooping sediment.

Martin doesn’t just want readers to imagine and hear vital erosion. He also wants them to insult her.

He describes how dinosaurs chewed on rotten wood to get to insects and how the insects, in turn, bored into the limb bones of large Jurassic dinosaurs that seem to be trapped in a foul-smelling mud pit of decomposing flesh in Colorado.

The book provides many recent examples of biological devices closer to home. Martin writes that Georgia “hosts small, furry, bone-crushing creatures that descend from trees and eat skulls.” He knows this from personal observation of gray squirrels relentlessly gnawing at the skull of a cow he and his wife hung in their yard.

“It’s their calcium supplement,” he explains.

Then there are all the vitals who were busy working at Stone Mountain.

Lichens colonized the surface of the enormous rocks as soon as they appeared in the air, starting the process of soil formation that then allowed plants to take root. The animals began to trot and dig into its crumbling surface. Those animals eventually included humans, among the leading biological diggers of solids on the planet.

Humans have carved huge chunks out of the side of Mount Hajar and removed tons of granite from its core. And any time you climb Stone Mountain, Martin wants you to think you’re taking a little powder dust with you on your boots when you leave.

“The book is full of ‘aha’ moments for the reader,” says Martin. “I want to encourage people to look for evidence and expand their awareness of how life shaped Earth.”