Otherlands: A World in the Making - A Sunday Times bestseller

Product Information

Not that there's anything wrong with that! At its best, it's a beautiful way to experience these past worlds. And I certainly learned new stuff in every chapter (more detail can be found in my reading updates, where I summarized each chapter as I finished). Halliday has a poetic soul, and he has a way of making you see the profundity of earth and life processes. Halliday, T. (2022) Otherlands: A journey through Earth's extinct worlds. New York, NY: Random House. 283 pp. ISBN:9780593132883 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. 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. 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"

Thomas Halliday's debut is a kaleidoscopic and evocative journey into deep time. He takes quiet fossil records and complex scientific research and brings them alive - riotous, full-coloured and three-dimensional. You'll find yourself next to giant two-metre penguins in a forested Antarctica 41 million years ago or hearing singing icebergs in South Africa some 444 million years ago. Maybe most importantly, Otherlands is a timely reminder of our planet's impermanence and what we can learn from the past Thomas Halliday's debut is a kaleidoscopic and evocative journey into deep time. He takes quiet fossil records and complex scientific research and brings them alive - riotous, full-coloured and three-dimensional. You'll find yourself next to giant two-metre penguins in a forested Antarctica 41 million years ago or hearing singing icebergs in South Africa some 444 million years ago. Maybe most importantly, Otherlands is a timely reminder of our planet's impermanence and what we can learn from the past Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature 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.What is important in conserving a ecosystem is conserving the functions, the connections between organism that form a complete, interacting whole. In reality, species do move, and the notion of ‘native’ species is inevitably arbitrary, often tied into national identity.

In one chapter, we discover that giant penguins flourished in the then-rainforests of Antarctica during the Eocene. In another, how Jurassic seas in what is now Germany contained vast tropical reefs built by glass sponges that looked like “frozen lace”, as marine pterosaurs soared in the skies overhead. We also see how, during the Devonian period, Scotland was home to metres-high fungi that would have resembled “half-melted grey snowmen”. We have had life on this planet for a substantial period that it has been whirling around the sun. But the life that you will find is significantly different to the plants birds and animals that we can find around us now. 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" This book takes us through the natural history of previous forms of life in the most beguiling way. It makes you think about the past differently and it certainly makes you think about the future differently. This is a monumental work and I suspect it will be a very important book for future generations Ray Mears, Chair of the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing

Customer reviews

That over time the planet has frozen over almost from pole to equator, heated up almost beyond imagining, became more like what we have today, and everything in between. For a time, summer temperatures in what is now Antarctica reached the high seventies, and "the entire continent is covered with a lush closed-canopy forest and filled with the shrieks of birds and rustling undergrowth." And, of course, there were extinctions. This is an utterly serious piece of work, meticulously evidence-based and epically cinematic. Or rather, beyond cinematic. The writing is so palpably alive... A book of almost unimaginable riches James McConnachie Sunday Times

Each cell is semi-independent, and a single sponge blurs the line between individual and colony. If you were to put one in a blender, it would re-aggregate — a different shape, but still a working organism, a functioning sponge. This is a fantastic, unique book which I'm only not rating higher because 1) it's a very specific mood/vibe, and more importantly, 2) I have never longed for pictures more fiercely while reading a book in my life. For most people, I would have to recommend that you wait until they make this a PBS or CuriosityStream TV or streaming series.McConnachie, James. "Otherlands by Thomas Halliday review — an extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth". The Sunday Times . Retrieved 2022-08-28. Otherlands is an exceptional debut that can be savoured like a fine wine. I found myself reciting passages to anyone within earshot. Beyond a fascinating tour of extinct lifeforms, Halliday’s carefully crafted yet poetic descriptions of scientific concepts are a masterclass in spellbinding science communication. McConnachie, James (January 30, 2022). "Otherlands by Thomas Halliday review — an extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth". The Sunday Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 2022-08-28. 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. 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.