Our story has several possible beginnings, but we’ll start on 13 May 1966 in Ica, the capital town of a small Peruvian coastal province, some 186 miles (300 km) south of the capital Lima. It was the 42nd birthday of a local physician, Dr Javier Cabrera Darquea and his old friend, photographer Felix Llosa Romero, had presented him with a seemingly innocent gift – a curiously marked stone.
Dr Cabrera – who had a long-standing interest in the prehistory of the region – examined the design on the stone and identified it as a species of fish that had become extinct millions of years ago.

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