Two billion years of history is encoded in that rock.

Not legibly, not in any form that you can read directly — but it is there, in the crystal structure of the quartz, in the trace minerals that give the sandstone its color, in the specific patterns of layering that record the conditions of ancient deposition.

The Roraima bush toad hopping across the wet rock near your feet is also encoding history — in its genome, in the specific adaptations that distinguish it from its lowland relatives, in the fact of its direct-developing eggs.

Its evolutionary history on the summit of Roraima is written in its biology, in the accumulated genetic differences between it and the ancestors it shares with other toads in the region.