Phosphorus is one of the elements that is crucial for the construction of organisms and their metabolism. Its cycle across the environments is also one of the best understood. However, it occurred to the Czech paleontologists Peter Kraft and Michal Mergl that there could still be some white spaces on the map of our understanding of such a fundamental process. Their publication, which takes a new view of the changes in the phosphorus cycle over geological time, was recently published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.