“The Permian desert of Locharbriggs would have looked like the desert landscapes of the Sahara, with dunes of windblown sand stretching as far as eye could see. This, though, was Scotland, which today is cool and rainswept, but 290 million years ago in early Permian times was some 10 degrees north of the equator, and a tiny part of the arid interior of the mighty Pangaea supercontinent. The remains of those ancient dunes are now fossilized as handsome sandstone strata which are quarried around the village of Locharbriggs. The sandstones still betray their desert origins. From the curved strata one can reconstruct the shape of those long-stilled dunes, and tell which way the Permian winds were blowing; and looking closely at the sand grains with a microscope shows myriad tiny scars on their surfaces, the result of innumerable grain-to-grain collisions in the Permian windstorms. Life was scarce, as in deserts today—but not completely absent. A few of the Locharbriggs sandstone surfaces show signs of brief rainfall, and the footprints of animals that may have included the iconic sail-backed pelycosaurs—a very different fauna to the deer, rabbits (and humans) that roam the Scottish landscapes today. The Locharbriggs dunes travelled along the land surface in a pattern that even in the Permian period was more than four billion years old, driven by winds that were guided by the great weather belts of Earth, in turn powered by the planet’s rotation and the rays of the Sun.” Professor Jan Zalasiewicz