From what what I remember, this saying is about Mary Anning and how she sold fossils by the beach in England where she lived. So most people probably didn’t know how to pick a rock with a fossil, or open it well enough to preserve said fossil

I think that these are fiction writers. The maths you’d use to design that bridge is fact and the book company merely decided how to display facts. They do not own that information, whereas the Handmaid’s Tale was the creation of Margaret Atwood and was an original work.