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Rebecca Stott is a professor of English literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia and an affiliated scholar at the department of the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University. She is the author of several books, including Darwin and the Barnacle and the novels Ghostwalk and The Coral Thief. She lives in Islington, London.

Ten years ago, I went looking for the people who had entertained ideas about the evolution of species before Darwin. I planned to use the material eventually, when I returned to creative non-fiction after publishing two books of historical fiction. The task was a difficult one. Darwin had looked and found a few, but the elusiveness -- ghostliness -- of his predecessors had exasperated him. He’d put together a ‘sketch’ to acknowledge them, and then given up.

I found a few important early evolutionists in the nineteenth-century: several in Paris, one in Kentucky, in Edinburgh, and one in the Malay Archipelago. I found a smaller number in the eighteenth century: in Paris again and in Lichfield, Derbyshire. I kept going back decade after decade, until I realised (to my excitement and horror) that my starting point was going to have to be Aristotle. Though he wasn’t an evolutionist, he was the father of zoology.

But how was I going to write about the Greek philosopher without making it up? We know very little about him. He left no diaries or letters, nothing but his philosophical works and a will. Historians have written, at times, contradictory accounts of his life, but no one knows more than the broad outlines.

For my book, "Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists," I needed to know about the two years Aristotle spent on the island of Lesbos around 347 BC. This is where he began his great zoological project: his attempt to record and document the habits of all the species in the world. I wanted to see him and his work from the ground, rather than from the historian’s bird-eye view. What was it like for Aristotle to walk the shores of Lesbos looking for new species of fish? What did Lesbos look like in 347 BC? Where did he live? What did he believe about creation and species? What woke him up at night? Who did he talk to? Did he talk to the fishermen of Lesbos? Did he share his philosophical questions with them?

I learned to make my curiosity visible; to be honest about the holes in the historical record, to articulate the questions that drove me, and to explain honestly how I reached the conclusions I reached. It was a quest. I discovered that most of the answers to my questions were in his books, if I looked carefully. Yes, Aristotle talked to the fishermen. Only they knew when and how sponges spawned. Only they knew what they looked like in their natural habitat. And I learned -- again -- that truth is often stranger than fiction: These sponge divers of Lesbos, like many working the Mediterranean at this time, were using diving equipment, either diving bells made of terracotta to trap air below the sea or using tubes to breathe with. In 347 BC.