 The title refers to the fossils that Dickinson had searched for as a child in Sheldrake, and again while visiting in the summer of 1926 before starting work on the painting.A few trilobites are included, the Beethoven mask lies on a large brachiopod, and the corner of a photograph of a fossil is visible under the man's right elbow.The picture was unnamed in his letters or journals until after he had read a history of men who had developed vaccines to combat debilitating diseases, "Microbe Hunters", including tuberculosis, which killed his mother.