Otherlands
Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES CROPPER WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING*
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE*
Shortlisted for Waterstones’s “Book of the Year 2022”
One of:The New Yorker’s “The Best Books of 2022 So Far”
Telegraph’s “50 best books of 2022”
Sapiens for natural history: a stirring, eye-opening journey into deep time, from the Ice Age to the first appearance of microbial life 550 million years ago, by a brilliant young paleobiologist.
The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life on the page.
This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt-or not. It takes us from the savannahs of Pliocene Kenya to watch a python chase a group of australopithecines into an acacia tree; to a cliff overlooking the salt pans of the empty basin of what will be the Mediterranean Sea just as water from the Miocene Atlantic Ocean spills in; into the tropical forests of Eocene Antarctica; and under the shallow pools of Ediacaran Australia, where we glimpse the first microbial life.
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.
Even as he operates on this broad canvas, Halliday brings us up close to the intricate relationships that defined these lost worlds. In novelistic prose that belies the breadth of his research, he illustrates how ecosystems are formed; how species die out and are replaced; and how species migrate, adapt, and collaborate. It is a breathtaking achievement: a surprisingly emotional narrative about the persistence of life, the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, and the scope of deep time, all of which have something to tell us about our current crisis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evolutionary biologist Halliday takes an energizing spin through Earth's past in his magnificent debut. Calling this "a naturalist's travel book," Halliday takes readers from the dry flatlands of Pleistocene Alaska, where "short willows write wordless calligraphy on the wind with flourished ink-brush catkins," to the Ediacaran skies, more than 500 million years ago, when even the stars were different. Along the way, he introduces myriad strange organisms: there's an enormous goose from Miocene-era Italy; Cretaceous China's winged reptile; the squidlike Tully Monster of the Carboniferous seas; and the wormy Hallucigenia found in Cambrian water. Halliday concludes in the present, cautioning that "there is no corner of the Earth where have not touched the way of life of its inhabitants in some way" but also asserting that humanity can "find the routes that avert disaster" in the future. The prose is stunning, and the author packs the narrative with geological, meteorological, and biological insights, turning dry history into something fascinating; for instance, the glass sponge reefs of the Jurassic period are "the largest biological structures ever to have existed," "three times the length of the Great Barrier Reef." This show-stopping work deserves wide readership.
