On the face of it, punctuation is not the most electrifying of subjects. A comma is a comma, a period is a period, and a semicolon is an argument waiting to happen. Look past squabbles over grammar, however, and punctuation’s staid veneer peels back to reveal a seething, Darwinian struggle that has played out over two millennia of the written word.

Though the period can claim an unbroken lineage stretching back to ancient Greece, and the quotation mark may boast of its roots in the early days of printing, for every venerable survivor there are countless other symbols that did not make the grade. The road from the scrolls of the library of Alexandria to today’s books, blog entries, and tweets is littered with the corpses of fallen marks of punctuation.

Read: 8 Punctuation Marks That Are No Longer Used | Keith Houston | HuffPost.