Otherlands is one of those rare books that's both deeply informative and daringly imaginative. It will change the way you look at the history of life, and perhaps also its future Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction Every animal phylum that exists in modern day has its origins during the Cambrian or, in some cases, earlier. Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life – yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar. The world on which we live is "undoubtedly a human planet", Thomas Halliday writes in this extraordinary debut. But "it has not always been, and perhaps will not always be". Humanity has dominated the Earth for a tiny fraction of its history. And that History is vast. We tend to lump all dinosaurs, for example, into one period in the distant past. But more time passed between the last Diplodocus and the first Tyrannosaurus than has passed between the last Tyrannosaurus and the present day. A mind-boggling fact. This is a glorious, mesmerising guide to the past 500 million years bought to life by this young palaeobiologist's rich and cinematic writing" Description of the specific location and time frame of each chapter within the book, "Otherlands." "Otherlands" & Thomas Halliday on climate change [ edit ]

One interesting feature was the author’s use of “trace fossils” – things like footprints, faeces and vomit, to reach conclusions about the behaviour of ancient species. As far as images, you get exactly two per chapter: one a map of the globe showing the relative positions of landmasses and seas during that time, and one pencil image of a life form from that era. I deeply appreciated both (especially the maps) but I wanted so, so much more! Halliday takes us on a journey into deep time in this epic book, showing us Earth as it used to be and the worlds that were here before ours" One of the main messages of the book is how ecosystems are dynamic and ever-changing. There is no such thing as an ideal ecosystem that can be frozen in time. Environments change and life changes with them, as long as the change isn’t too fast. It was sudden, catastrophic change that brought about the various mass extinctions of the past, and the message of that is obvious. Something of the same vertiginous connectivity comes when he talks about having children. When the first tetrapods emerged on to land, they still returned to the water to lay their eggs, as amphibians continue to do today. But later, species learnt to create hard-walled eggs which could contain the water inside and be laid anywhere on dry land; and later still, mammals internalised these eggs. But the human womb still recreates much of the biochemistry of the water that our ancestors laid their eggs in some 350 million years ago.To consider the landscapes that once existed is to feel the draw of a temporal wanderlust. My hope is that you will read this in the vein of a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space, and begin to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous yet familiar. The table below provides more detailed information about the specific locations and periods covered. This is another in a string of excellent palaeobiology books that have appeared in recent years; it's a field with a lot of great writers making research available to general audiences. This one has had perhaps the most plaudits, although personally I did not find it quite as compelling as some others like Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale or Tim Flannery's Europe: The First 100 Million Years. But really if you're interested in this stuff, you're spoilt for choice these days.

A fascinating journey through Earth's history [...] [Halliday] is appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy [...] To read Otherlands is to marvel not only at these unfamiliar lands and creatures, but also that we have the science to bring them to life in such vivid detail" I wanted to avoid writing things like, “In 1974, so-and-so did this study”, which is a useful form of science communication, but when I’m trying to evoke a place, it really takes you out of it. So there are almost no references to people at all – and that includes me or the reader. You can read it as if you’re there. It’s purely descriptive of the place. I was inspired by a lot of nature and travel writing, particularly books like John Lewis-Stempel’s Meadowland, Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry or Robert Macfarlane’s Underland – books that really give a sense of place.

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This is the past as we've never seen it before. Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday embraces a yet more epic timescale in Otherlands: A World in the Making, touring the many living worlds that preceded ours, from the mammoth steppe in glaciated Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica. If you have ever wondered what sound a pterosaur's wings made in flight, this is the book for you -- 'The best science books coming your way in 2022’ ― New Scientist In part, this is probably thanks to the hangover from the mass extinction that occurred at the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods[…]

Random stuff that stayed with me: monkeys rafted from Africa to South America! Likely on tree trunks, perhaps with chunks of jungle washed out to sea in major floods. Other stuff too. Only had to happen once! I read Eoghan Daltun’s An Irish Atlantic Rainforest, which is absolutely fantastic, a paean to rewilding and the benefits of letting nature do what it does best. It’s an exploration of how much life there is just waiting under the soil to return. I really enjoyed Katherine Rundell’s The Golden Mole, a selection of essays about endangered species that is very evocative. I’ve just started Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees by Jared Farmer, and it’s very interesting so far. One novel I absolutely loved recently was The Binding by Bridget Collins, a fantasy book about bookbinding and magic. From a dazzling young palaeontologist and prodigiously talented writer comes the Earth as we've never seen it before I got tempted into reading another book on palaeobiology. Lately I might have overdone the topic a little.The largest logjam in historical times lasted for nearly 1,000 years in the lands of the Caddoan Mississippian culture, now in Louisiana. Known as the Great Raft, it at one time covered more than 150 miles of river, an ever-shifting carpet of trunks slowly decaying in the water, and was an important element of local folklore and agriculture, providing fertile floodwater and trapping silt for crops. It would still be here today if it had not been blown up to allow boats through. Once it was gone, the river flooded the land downstream, requiring further dams to be built, and changing the dynamics of water flow in the region. Halliday is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. He has held research positions at University College London and the University of Birmingham, and has been part of paleontology field crews in Argentina and India. He holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Birmingham, and is a scientific associate of the Natural History Museum. His research combines theoretical and real data to investigate long-term patterns in the fossil record, particularly in mammals. He was the winner of the Linnean Society's John C. Marsden Medal in 2016 [1] and the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018. [2] Halliday’s strengths lie in his vivid descriptions of the interactions between organisms that sustain and alter ecosystems over time. Halliday transports the reader directly into the action where they can stand looking around, absorbing the beauty and harshness of landscapes that feel simultaneously familiar and alien. Halliday is an eloquent and poetic writer, and I found myself wanting to read passages aloud to anyone who would listen. Halliday has a way of conveying the epic nature of ecosystem interactions, and writes dramatically and intensely about everything from a cave bear taking down a woolly mammoth to the amazing mutualistic relationship between fungi and plants that allowed plants to begin to thrive on land in the Devonian. Otherlands review: A fascinating journey through Earth's history". New Scientist. January 19, 2022.

A fascinating journey through Earth's history... [Halliday] is appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy... To read Otherlands is to marvel not only at these unfamiliar lands and creatures, but also that we have the science to bring them to life in such vivid detail Gege Li New Scientist I think by far my favorite aspect of this book was the soothing and comforting nature of the story that Halliday is telling. No matter the time period he is describing, Halliday makes a point to return to some underlying common themes in the last few paragraphs of each chapter that at times left me emotional. It is clear that Halliday is focused on conveying that life on Earth is both fragile and unstoppable. He describes speciation, hostile landscapes, intense geological restructuring and extinction through the lens of regeneration and revitalization. Halliday does not imply that the climate change we are facing currently is benign or expected, but he leaves the reader feeling confident in the forces of ecology and hopeful that life will find a way to continue on. Deep time is very hard to capture – even to imagine – and yet Thomas Halliday has done so in this fascinating volume. He wears his grasp of vast scientific learning lightly; this is as close to time travel as you are likely to get" An immersive world tour of prehistoric life [...] Halliday never loses sight of the bigger picture, nimbly marshalling a huge array of insights thrown up by recent research. Each chapter gives not only a vivid snapshot of an ecosystem in action but also insights into geology, climate science, evolution and biochemistry [...] Mind-blowing"A brilliant series of reconstructions of life in the deep past, richly imagined from the fine details of the fossil record [...] A real achievement [...] Reading Halliday's book is as near to the experience of visiting these ancient worlds as you are likely to get" Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description – whether the colour of a beetle’s shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air – is grounded in the fossil record. Un libro que no es más que un reclamo para la consciencia, para desentrañar los misterios de un ecosistema que nos rodea y lo suficientemente frágil como para depender de pocos factores, por los cuales se puede desencadenar el desastre. Each chapter spans a geological time period, focusing on a specific part of the world that stands out either for the quality of the fossil evidence or a notable event. In a long and heartfelt epilogue, Halliday looks at the current ongoing extinction event and the course of climate change. Though the world has been much warmer in the past, he is wary of taking comfort in the comparison, since we are now carbonising the world at a rate which is, even in geological terms, completely unprecedented. At the same time, he warns, ‘we must not become despondent’. Cynicism and despair solve nothing, the choice is not between death or salvation, and everything that can be done to reduce the impact, flatten the curve, and slow the inevitable is important: ultimately, he maintains, the disaster ‘is something we can manage’ with the right personal and policy choices.