350 million years ago the place that is now Edinburgh lay near the equator, and was a landscape of rivers with, perhaps, an adjoining tropical sea. While life was present on land there were no flowering plants and the highest forms of vertebrate life on land were early lizards, the latter now identified in the fossil record as Westlothiana lizziae. See http://www.answers.com/topic/westlothiana.

The eruption of Edinburgh’s volcano changed that peaceful scene, and this gallery will be an attempt to tell part of that story in pictures.