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

Product Information

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] 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.

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. For what I liked: the completeness of the whole thing. Take a period - Cambrian, one of my favs. - and just delve into it. Plants, animals, other things and you feel like you're breathing in that time. The author doesn't stop there: you've also got a take on the weather, the atmosphere, the seasons, the topography/geography down to the finest swampy or desert-like detail. The picture is loaded with paint, in other words. It was so detailed I did one period or section at a time, and just allowed myself to wallow in the Silurian-ness or Ordovician-ness, or whatever-ness of it. Particularly powerful are his reflections on deep time. A recurrent theme in this book is that of impermanence: "gatherings of species in time and space may give the illusion of stability, but these communities can only last as long as the conditions that help to create them persist" (p. 18). Some ecosystems never return. The long-lived Jurassic crinoid colonies (155 mya) that made a home on floating logs blown into the sea during storms disappeared when the evolution of shipworms made "this way of life impossible, something that can and will never be replicated in quite the same way again; wood just doesn't float for as long as it used to" (p. 151). And while the world feels old in our day, it is easy to forget the world was already old in the deep past. The mountains of the Triassic (225 mya) "are built from the deep sea", within which can be seen "the coils and shapes of the long-extinct creatures of the Carboniferous seas, well over 100 million years old even now" (p. 158). However, if you're a superfan of learning about the history of life on our planet, this book offers a pleasingly comprehensive take unburdened by specialist jargon - and with a rare sense of poignancy.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 Otherlands also offers us a vast perspective on the current state of the planet. The thought that something as vast as the Great Barrier Reef, for example, with all its vibrant diversity, might one day soon be gone sounds improbable. But the fossil record shows us that this sort of wholesale change is not only possible but has repeatedly happened throughout Earth history.

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 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. Otherlands review: A fascinating journey through Earth's history". New Scientist. January 19, 2022.