Chris Jones published 'Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry,' a major scholarly work that traces the use of the fossil metaphor in the context of language and poetic tradition. Jones argues that 19th-century poets used the concept of 'fossil' to discuss the origins and preservation of ancient English words, linking philology with geology. The book demonstrates how deeply the metaphor of the fossil permeated Victorian literary thought and how it was used to legitimize and revitalize English poetry.

Jones's 'Fossil Poetry' is a landmark study that has significantly advanced our understanding of the relationship between science and literature in the 19th century. It reveals the profound and complex ways in which geological and paleontological concepts were adopted and adapted by poets and philologists. This work has confirmed the fossil's central role in the Victorian poetic imagination and provided a new framework for analyzing the language of poems by figures like Tennyson, Hopkins, and Morris.