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

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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. 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 Cal Flynn, author of ISLANDS OF ABANDONMENT Here are a few passages to give you a feel for the content: By the time the mammoth steppe finally came to an end, when Wrangel’s mammoths glinted on cliffs overlooking the flooded plains of Beringia, the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Norte Chico in Peru had already existed for generations, and the civilizations of the Indus Vally were centuries old. 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. 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"

From a dazzling young palaeontologist and prodigiously talented writer comes the Earth as we've never seen it before Read 2/3.. I think this would have worked movingly and excitingly as accompanying narration to a visual documentary. Or at least had tons of photos or diagrams showing what the words were referring to. The writing is unimpeachable, the book topic is top-shelf, the scope of timespans covered is immense. Furthermore I'd like to think I have as much fortitude and eagerness for nature writing and reams of descriptions of flora and fauna as any layman. Yet this book, to me only, read as tantalizingly as the most tedious of encyclopedias. I feel like unless one is a previously trained evolutionary biologist whose heart palpitates at discussions of obscure paleogeography, one can't help one's eyes glazing over the delirious amount of incomprehensible terminology. The following passage drawn at random is a more accessible sample of the writing in this book:

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! Writing with gusto and bravado [...] Halliday has honed a unique voice... Otherlands is a verbal feast. You feel like you are there on the Mammoth Steppe, some 20,000 years ago, as frigid winds blow off the glacial front... Along the way, we learn astounding facts Steve Brusatte, Scientific American 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.

That Africa spent time at the South Pole, the Sahara was covered by a glacier, that the northern hemisphere was almost entirely landless, that Siberia was an island, that the moon was much closer to the earth and the day significantly shorter than it is now, and that North America was mostly divided by a warm, shallow sea Halliday uncovers for the lay public the vast changes in fauna, flora, topography, and climate over the past 555 million years. He observes cyclical changes, including cycles of ice ages and climate warming, and periods of mass extinction followed by periods of mass flourishing. However at each renewal, life takes on completely different forms that are adapted to the new environmental conditions. Thus, life goes on but species do not. Looking forward on a paleontology time scale, humankind will inevitably go extinct. Halliday indicates that humankind bears a huge responsibility in the trajectory of our contemporary climate change. Today's atmosphere has a similar composition as during the Oligocene (an epoch ranging from 34 million to 23 million years ago during the Palaeogene period shown within the table above). However, by the end of this century, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) projects that the level of CO 2 in the atmosphere could reach levels of CO 2 similar to the Eocene (the preceding epoch to the Oligocene ranging from 56 million to 34 million years ago). Temperature ranges during the Eocene were a lot higher than contemporary ones. And, the only way to reduce this prospective increase in temperature is by decreasing CO 2 emissions and flatten the upward trajectory of atmospheric CO 2 concentration. inquisitivebiologist (2022-03-15). "Book review – Otherlands: A World in the Making". The Inquisitive Biologist . Retrieved 2022-08-28. 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!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. 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. Superb... [An] epic, near-hallucinatory natural history of the living earth... Dazzling Simon Ings, Telegraph 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 ‘The Hottest Books of the Year Ahead’, Independent The word "original" is really overworked. But Thomas Halliday has produced a book the like of which I have never come across Jeremy Paxman

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

Retailers:

A mesmerising journey into those vast stretches of Earth's pre-history that lie behind us, on such a scale that you experience a kind of temporal vertigo just thinking about it... [Halliday is] a brilliant writer, his lyrical style vividly conjuring myriad lost worlds... It's obviously a bit of a gamble choosing one's Book of the Year in March - but there's a very good chance already that mine will be Otherlands. Stunning Christopher Hart, Mail on Sunday 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] 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 That there was an eruption in the Arctic some 250 million years ago, when most of the world's land masses were part of a single massive continent, " a blast unlike any other... 4 million cubic kilometres of lava – enough to fill the modern-day Mediterranean Sea – which will flood an area the size of Australia. That eruption will tear through recently formed coal beds, turning the Earth into a candle, and drifting coal ash and toxic metals over the land, transforming watercourses into deadly slurries. Oxygen will boil from the oceans; bacteria will bloom and produce poisonous hydrogen sulphide. The foul-smelling sulphides will infuse the seas and skies. Ninety-five per cent of all species on Earth will perish in what will become known as the Great Dying."

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" Trilobites! This book is total catnip for fossil fans -- but I'll bet you didn't know that people have been collecting trilobites for 15,000 years! Really! He even has a footnote. Glaser, Joe (June 5, 2022). "Book review: 'Otherlands' ". Bowling Green Daily News . Retrieved 2022-08-28.Halliday is excellent at showing the ways in which these unimaginably remote environments connect with life today. There is a theory that the first cells developed by natural chemical reactions around deep-sea alkaline vents, which can produce tiny fatty droplets which lead to the concentration of a compound called pyrophosphate. This is still the chemical reaction that cells use today, in the form of ATP, and which drives every living thing on earth. ‘To perform any action,’ Halliday says, ‘from firing nerves to secreting saliva, from contracting a muscle to DNA replication, every cell within the body must first replicate some of the chemistry of the earth bleeding into the sea’ some four billion years ago. 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. Book review: Otherlands: A World In The Making, by Thomas Halliday". www.scotsman.com. 2022-02-09 . Retrieved 2022-08-28. For me, who loves paleontology and even considered it as a career before I became a teacher, this book is a treat. Not easy to get through at times, but worth the effort.