Halliday, T. (2022) Otherlands: A journey through Earth's extinct worlds. New York, NY: Random House. 283 pp. ISBN:9780593132883 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"

Vivid [...] An intricate analysis of our planet's interconnected past, it is impossible to come away from Otherlands without awe for what may lie ahead" 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. 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. Our biology in the modern day, our poor colour vision, is a direct consequence of our reliance on scent, our abandonment of vision, our ancestral journey into the night.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.

of all livings things can die and it resets. Of course, if we want to live as humans, then we need to consider our actions—Now. Life evolves to fit the world in which it finds itself, but geography, of ocean currents, the position of continents, wind patterns and atmospheric chemistry defines the parameters of that world. Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however. By studying the distant past, Halliday can envision prospective climate change scenarios. Depending on how much CO 2is emitted, the Earthcould very well be heading towards Eocene-temperature levels far faster than any underlying long term paleontology-cycle would suggest. McConnachie, James. "Otherlands by Thomas Halliday review — an extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth". The Sunday Times . Retrieved 2022-08-28. A bracing pleasure for Earth-science buffs and readers interested in diving into deep history." [5]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. 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" An extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth [...] Epically cinematic [...] The writing is so palpably alive. A book of almost unimaginable riches. It is a book that will make its own solid and lasting contribution. It could well be the best I read in 2022 – and I know it's only January" Book review: Otherlands: A World In The Making, by Thomas Halliday". www.scotsman.com. 2022-02-09 . Retrieved 2022-08-28.

Stirring, surprising and beautifully written, Otherlands offers glimpses of times so different to our own they feel like parallel worlds. In its lyricism and the intimate attention it pays to nonhuman life, Thomas Halliday's book recalls Rachel Carson's Under the Sea Wind, and marks the arrival of an exciting new voice" Our planet has been many different worlds over its 4.5-billion-year history. Imagining what they were like is hard—with our limited lifespan, deep time eludes us by its very nature. Otherlands, the debut of Scottish palaeontologist Thomas Halliday, presents you with a series of past worlds. Though this is a non-fiction book thoroughly grounded in fact, it is the quality of the narrative that stands out. Beyond imaginative metaphors to describe extinct lifeforms, some of his reflections on deep time, taxonomy, and evolution are simply spine-tingling." [6] Very shortly after starting to read this I thought to myself, "This is earth science for lit fic fans." It is refreshing to come across a book on palaeontology and geology that doesn’t just state what we know and why. Instead, Halliday uses scientific information to provide insights into worlds long gone. He is appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy.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.

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. And that's another stylistic choice he made, to present stuff that's still controversial as settled. Which does make for smoother reading, and he is for sure way more up to date than me. Still.

Every animal phylum that exists in modern day has its origins during the Cambrian or, in some cases, earlier.