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Dávné světy: Výpravy do zaniklých ekosystémů Země
Pradávná minulost nám zanechala stopy v podobě fosilních záznamů, které odhalují, k jakým změnám v historii Země opakovaně docházelo. Thomas Halliday využil nejmodernější vědecké poznatky k jejich rozluštění. V této knize nechává úplněji než kdykoli předtím na stránkách ožít šestnáct fosilních nalezišť.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2022
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March 24, 2024
“The worlds of the past can sometimes seem unimaginably distant.�
On the timescale of life on Earth, our lifespans - even the timespan of our entire civilization from when we as a species started scribbling on cave walls - seem like those of suicidal fruit flies. Blink and we are gone, barely there on geological time scales. And yet life has persisted on our planet for an unimaginably long stretch of eternity, in the forms that to us in the here and now may seem incredibly strange and alien, lasting through horrific mass extinctions and changes and challenges in the world that seem unsurmountable (Snowball Earth, anyone?), with continents moving about and climate fluctuating wildly, and even occasional asteroids slamming into an unsuspecting dinosaur paradise.
Life persisted and adapted and overall flourished in intricate ecosystems.
One may say, life always, uh, finds a way.
Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands is a reverse journey through time and places, from a few thousand years ago backwards in time to 550 million years back, focusing on ecosystems that flourished once upon a time in several sites around the world � through these fascinating and incredibly distant in time “otherlands� that get stranger and stranger the farther back in time we go.
Every one of these imaginary visits to a site in the past focuses on the entire ecosystem because no organism exists in isolation from its environment. And those are truly fascinating places, with one of my favorite chapters focusing on visiting a time when Mediterranean Sea was a dried-up hellish desert of sea salt (you guys, hell exists and this is it, paleobiologically speaking) � a place that is both awesome and pants-soilingly terrifying to imagine. And if it gets too unfriendly, perhaps the depths of Silurian oceans may be fun to visit for a while. Or nice and warm Antarctica forests. Or hang out with the dinosaurs - that’s always a treat. Or go way back to the Ediacarans when nothing on Earth would looks at all familiar to us.
Life finds a way, over and over again.
Halliday is great at giving us snapshots of deep time, not just a few cool animals but a good idea of what their entire ecosystem was like, painting it in the mind startlingly vividly to the point where I felt like I was actually watching the strange worlds unfold around me through a window of a time machine as the world slid further and further into the depths of time, to the time of the giant Moon in the sky looming much closer, and 22-hour days, and night sky patterns all but unrecognizable. And that’s me coming from the world where through our efforts most of the birds are chickens grown to satisfy our appetites. Future paleobiologists will have a field day trying to figure out why all the chickens took over the world.
4.5 stars.
—ĔĔĔĔ�
Also posted on .
On the timescale of life on Earth, our lifespans - even the timespan of our entire civilization from when we as a species started scribbling on cave walls - seem like those of suicidal fruit flies. Blink and we are gone, barely there on geological time scales. And yet life has persisted on our planet for an unimaginably long stretch of eternity, in the forms that to us in the here and now may seem incredibly strange and alien, lasting through horrific mass extinctions and changes and challenges in the world that seem unsurmountable (Snowball Earth, anyone?), with continents moving about and climate fluctuating wildly, and even occasional asteroids slamming into an unsuspecting dinosaur paradise.
Life persisted and adapted and overall flourished in intricate ecosystems.
One may say, life always, uh, finds a way.
Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands is a reverse journey through time and places, from a few thousand years ago backwards in time to 550 million years back, focusing on ecosystems that flourished once upon a time in several sites around the world � through these fascinating and incredibly distant in time “otherlands� that get stranger and stranger the farther back in time we go.
“Those worlds, those otherlands, cannot be visited � at least, not in a physical sense. You can never visit the environments through which titanic dinosaurs strode, never walk on their soil nor swim in their water. The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth.
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.�
Every one of these imaginary visits to a site in the past focuses on the entire ecosystem because no organism exists in isolation from its environment. And those are truly fascinating places, with one of my favorite chapters focusing on visiting a time when Mediterranean Sea was a dried-up hellish desert of sea salt (you guys, hell exists and this is it, paleobiologically speaking) � a place that is both awesome and pants-soilingly terrifying to imagine. And if it gets too unfriendly, perhaps the depths of Silurian oceans may be fun to visit for a while. Or nice and warm Antarctica forests. Or hang out with the dinosaurs - that’s always a treat. Or go way back to the Ediacarans when nothing on Earth would looks at all familiar to us.
Life finds a way, over and over again.
“There is no such thing as a fixed ideal for an environment, no reef onto which nostalgia can anchor. The human imposition of borders on the world inevitably changes our perception of what ‘belongs� where, but to look into deep time is to see only an ever-changing list of inhabitants of one ecosystem or another. That is not to say that native species do not exist, only that the concept of native that we so easily tie to a sense of place also applies to time.�
Halliday is great at giving us snapshots of deep time, not just a few cool animals but a good idea of what their entire ecosystem was like, painting it in the mind startlingly vividly to the point where I felt like I was actually watching the strange worlds unfold around me through a window of a time machine as the world slid further and further into the depths of time, to the time of the giant Moon in the sky looming much closer, and 22-hour days, and night sky patterns all but unrecognizable. And that’s me coming from the world where through our efforts most of the birds are chickens grown to satisfy our appetites. Future paleobiologists will have a field day trying to figure out why all the chickens took over the world.
“In the complex game that is an ecosystem, every player is connected to some, but not all, others, a web not just of food but of competition, of who lives where, of light and shade, and of internal disputes within species. Extinction bursts through that web, breaking connections and threatening its integrity. Sever one strand, and it wavers, reshapes, but survives. Tear another, and it will still hold. Over long periods, repairs are made as species adapt, and new balances are reached, new associations made. If enough strands are broken at once, the web will collapse, drifting in the breeze, and the world will have to make do with what little remains. So, after a mass extinction event, a turnover happens, with new species appearing, the web self-repairing.�
4.5 stars.
—ĔĔĔĔ�
Also posted on .
January 31, 2023
“The worlds of the past can sometimes seem unimaginably distant. The geological history of the Earth stretches back about 4.5 billion years� The landscapes that have existed over geological time, revealed by the palaeontological record, are varied and, at times, quite other to the world of today� Those worlds, those otherlands, cannot be visited � at least, not in a physical sense. You can never visit the environments through which titanic dinosaurs strode, never walk on their soil nor swim in their water. The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth. 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.�
Science class was never this much fun! Using the word “fun� might be a bit misleading, however, as this was written for educational rather than purely entertainment purposes. Thomas Halliday shares loads of information, facts and scientific inferences with his readers, but he does so in a very engaging way. I won’t say this book is unputdownable, because you absolutely must take the time to digest after each chapter as I did. Unless you are a brilliant paleobiologist like Halliday, chances are that although some information might ring a bell, a lot of it will be new to you. There is an extensive list of resources at the end of the book � if Halliday didn’t already know it himself, he did his research without a doubt! This review won’t be an attempt to explain any of the science. I’m just here to tell you that if looking back at the geological and biological history of the earth interests you at all, then this is the book to pick up. I felt like I was on the most incredible journey for the past couple of months.
“The journey through the history of life is at times unfathomably long.�
I found the structure of the book quite interesting. Rather than starting with the oldest geological epoch, instead we are taken back through time, beginning with the Pleistocene, about 20,000 years ago. This is the epoch just prior to the one in which you and I exist � The Holocene (yes, I had to look this up; I don’t just know this stuff!) From here we travel backwards 550 million years to the Ediacaran. There are sixteen different epochs covered and what fascinating worlds those were! I’m not sure I could pick a favorite if you asked; I was intrigued by them all. Evolution, weird creatures, mass extinctions, greenhouse Earth, icehouse Earth, volcanoes, asteroids, oceans, rivers, forests, climate change � it’s all here. The thing is, Thomas Halliday is not a “preacher�. He’s done his work, he presents the information beautifully, and you can’t walk away from this wondering where our planet is headed next. What goes around comes around and cycles are repeated for one reason or another. But naturally, with the evolution of humanity, things are a bit different now.
“This is now undoubtedly a human planet. It has not always been, and perhaps will not always be, but, for now, our species has an influence unlike almost any other biological force.�
There are some chilling facts shared in the epilogue. If any piece of this book should be construed as a warning of sorts, it would be here. However, it’s not a matter of finger pointing or shaming or even scaring one to death about the consequences of inaction. Thomas Halliday is too smart to take that approach. Rather, he allows us the freedom to use our own intellect and draw some conclusions. If one is clever enough to take the information given and make informed assumptions, then it’s rather obvious. It’s happened before and it can happen again. If you have any desire to learn about Earth’s geological history, the evolution of various species, and the amazing feats of adaptation; and if you ever think about where we might be headed next, then by all means grab this book. It’s informative and extremely well-written. If I could be allowed one very minor criticism, it would be that I wished for more incredible illustrations. Having said that, I would be very gratified if I found another book by this genius in my hands again someday!
“We know that change is occurring, we know that we are responsible, we know what will happen if it continues, we know that we can stop it, and we know how. The question is whether we will try.�
Science class was never this much fun! Using the word “fun� might be a bit misleading, however, as this was written for educational rather than purely entertainment purposes. Thomas Halliday shares loads of information, facts and scientific inferences with his readers, but he does so in a very engaging way. I won’t say this book is unputdownable, because you absolutely must take the time to digest after each chapter as I did. Unless you are a brilliant paleobiologist like Halliday, chances are that although some information might ring a bell, a lot of it will be new to you. There is an extensive list of resources at the end of the book � if Halliday didn’t already know it himself, he did his research without a doubt! This review won’t be an attempt to explain any of the science. I’m just here to tell you that if looking back at the geological and biological history of the earth interests you at all, then this is the book to pick up. I felt like I was on the most incredible journey for the past couple of months.
“The journey through the history of life is at times unfathomably long.�
I found the structure of the book quite interesting. Rather than starting with the oldest geological epoch, instead we are taken back through time, beginning with the Pleistocene, about 20,000 years ago. This is the epoch just prior to the one in which you and I exist � The Holocene (yes, I had to look this up; I don’t just know this stuff!) From here we travel backwards 550 million years to the Ediacaran. There are sixteen different epochs covered and what fascinating worlds those were! I’m not sure I could pick a favorite if you asked; I was intrigued by them all. Evolution, weird creatures, mass extinctions, greenhouse Earth, icehouse Earth, volcanoes, asteroids, oceans, rivers, forests, climate change � it’s all here. The thing is, Thomas Halliday is not a “preacher�. He’s done his work, he presents the information beautifully, and you can’t walk away from this wondering where our planet is headed next. What goes around comes around and cycles are repeated for one reason or another. But naturally, with the evolution of humanity, things are a bit different now.
“This is now undoubtedly a human planet. It has not always been, and perhaps will not always be, but, for now, our species has an influence unlike almost any other biological force.�
There are some chilling facts shared in the epilogue. If any piece of this book should be construed as a warning of sorts, it would be here. However, it’s not a matter of finger pointing or shaming or even scaring one to death about the consequences of inaction. Thomas Halliday is too smart to take that approach. Rather, he allows us the freedom to use our own intellect and draw some conclusions. If one is clever enough to take the information given and make informed assumptions, then it’s rather obvious. It’s happened before and it can happen again. If you have any desire to learn about Earth’s geological history, the evolution of various species, and the amazing feats of adaptation; and if you ever think about where we might be headed next, then by all means grab this book. It’s informative and extremely well-written. If I could be allowed one very minor criticism, it would be that I wished for more incredible illustrations. Having said that, I would be very gratified if I found another book by this genius in my hands again someday!
“We know that change is occurring, we know that we are responsible, we know what will happen if it continues, we know that we can stop it, and we know how. The question is whether we will try.�
September 29, 2024
I got tempted into reading another book on palaeobiology. Lately I might have overdone the topic a little.
The author has taken two approaches to try and make his book stand out in a crowded market. One is to order the book so that we travel backwards in time as we read. He starts with the most recent epochs and ends with the Ediacaran Period, more than half a billion years in the past. With each chapter the world he describes becomes more unfamiliar to us.
More significantly though, is the way this book seeks to put ancient species into an ecological context. The author wants to move away from presenting individual fossils, to look instead at “the interactions, niches, food webs and flow of minerals and nutrients.� He does this by selecting, for each epoch, a particular site that is rich in fossils from the relevant period, and using those fossils to paint a picture of an ecosystem. Generally speaking he will only describe the creatures whose fossils are found at the site. The aim is to illustrate what this particular world was like, not to list every species that lived at the time.
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.
When reading the book, I enjoyed the early chapters (covering the more recent epochs) but surprisingly got a bit bogged down with the Cretaceous, the Jurassic and the Triassic � the time of the dinosaurs. Perhaps I’ve just read too much already about these periods in history. My interest picked up again at the Permian, but then I enjoy reading about both the unusual biota of that period and the catastrophic extinction at the end of it, the nearest we ever came to life on Earth being wiped out. The last couple of chapters, on the strange creatures of the Cambrian and the Ediacaran, were quite fascinating.
"One thing is certain; whether those that we observe are among them or not, there are beings in the Ediacaran seas that are starting out on the long walk � our long walk � to now."
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.
Quite a good read. Overall perhaps a low four stars for me.
The author has taken two approaches to try and make his book stand out in a crowded market. One is to order the book so that we travel backwards in time as we read. He starts with the most recent epochs and ends with the Ediacaran Period, more than half a billion years in the past. With each chapter the world he describes becomes more unfamiliar to us.
More significantly though, is the way this book seeks to put ancient species into an ecological context. The author wants to move away from presenting individual fossils, to look instead at “the interactions, niches, food webs and flow of minerals and nutrients.� He does this by selecting, for each epoch, a particular site that is rich in fossils from the relevant period, and using those fossils to paint a picture of an ecosystem. Generally speaking he will only describe the creatures whose fossils are found at the site. The aim is to illustrate what this particular world was like, not to list every species that lived at the time.
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.
When reading the book, I enjoyed the early chapters (covering the more recent epochs) but surprisingly got a bit bogged down with the Cretaceous, the Jurassic and the Triassic � the time of the dinosaurs. Perhaps I’ve just read too much already about these periods in history. My interest picked up again at the Permian, but then I enjoy reading about both the unusual biota of that period and the catastrophic extinction at the end of it, the nearest we ever came to life on Earth being wiped out. The last couple of chapters, on the strange creatures of the Cambrian and the Ediacaran, were quite fascinating.
"One thing is certain; whether those that we observe are among them or not, there are beings in the Ediacaran seas that are starting out on the long walk � our long walk � to now."
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.
Quite a good read. Overall perhaps a low four stars for me.
May 31, 2022
(Edited on April 10, 2022 because I had written No Pictures, but there are a few, at the start of each chapter there is one drawing.)
Fascinating book but tough to get through...
Helps if one has a science background, or just an interest in science. I taught all this once upon a time, but I still found it very deep, complex, and no nonsense - this is NOT a dumbed-down book by any means. One other critique before I get to what I liked: FEW PICTURES. So what I did was use one of my dozen or so 'dinosaur books,' to fill in the gaps. I also have a few of prehistoric life, which covers just about anything. If a creature or plant or whatever piqued my curiosity and the written descrip. just wasn't enough, I picked up a hefty book and looked it up. OR, used Google.
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.
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.
Five stars.
Fascinating book but tough to get through...
Helps if one has a science background, or just an interest in science. I taught all this once upon a time, but I still found it very deep, complex, and no nonsense - this is NOT a dumbed-down book by any means. One other critique before I get to what I liked: FEW PICTURES. So what I did was use one of my dozen or so 'dinosaur books,' to fill in the gaps. I also have a few of prehistoric life, which covers just about anything. If a creature or plant or whatever piqued my curiosity and the written descrip. just wasn't enough, I picked up a hefty book and looked it up. OR, used Google.
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.
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.
Five stars.
April 15, 2023
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 or Tim Flannery's . But really if you're interested in this stuff, you're spoilt for choice these days.
Flannery was looking at the evolution of a particular continent (Europe), and Dawkins at the evolution of a particular species (us). In both cases the focus gave a sense of narrative progression to things. Here, Thomas Halliday's focus is more diffuse and, because he works backwards from the present day to the distant past, any sense of teleology is eliminated. We're left with a series of flashes illuminating scenes at random through time and space, disappearing into an increasingly unfamiliar place.
By the final chapter we are in the Ediacaran, 550 million years ago. That's a long time back, nearly an eighth of the age of the universe. The pole star did not exist yet, nor did the stars of Orion; the moon was twelve thousand kilometres closer than it is today, and fifteen percent brighter, and the day itself was only twenty-two hours long, before friction slowed us down. It was a completely unknown, alien world. Yet macroscopic life was already on Earth, and had been there for a good 20 million years already: strange comb jellies, giant algae, wormlike bilaterians.
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.
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.
I find such ideas more exquisite than anything in religion, in fact I have tears in my eye just writing them out again now. And Halliday finds ways to draw such conclusions time and again � even when not related to the present day. Looking at the wing-markings of extinct kalligramatid butterflies, for instance, he notes the fact that wing-spots are often designed to mimic the eyes of apex predators, and distils this down to a beautiful idea: ‘Perhaps, preserved in the wings of ephemeral Oregramma, are some of the last mirrors to the gaze of a non-avian dinosaur.�
In a long and heartfelt epilogue, Halliday looks at the current ongoing extinction event and the course of climate change. Though the world has been much warmer in the past, he is wary of taking comfort in the comparison, since we are now carbonising the world at a rate which is, even in geological terms, completely unprecedented. At the same time, he warns, ‘we must not become despondent�. Cynicism and despair solve nothing, the choice is not between death or salvation, and everything that can be done to reduce the impact, flatten the curve, and slow the inevitable is important: ultimately, he maintains, the disaster‘is something we can manage� with theright personal and policy choices.
The more this message is rammed down people's throats the better, and the deep context offered for it by a book like this is, if sobering, enormously energising in the way that the truth so often is. Perhaps the overall message is that we cannot make decisions about the future � or even understand the present � without first knowing about the past. In the final analysis, ‘There is no separationof biology from history�.
Flannery was looking at the evolution of a particular continent (Europe), and Dawkins at the evolution of a particular species (us). In both cases the focus gave a sense of narrative progression to things. Here, Thomas Halliday's focus is more diffuse and, because he works backwards from the present day to the distant past, any sense of teleology is eliminated. We're left with a series of flashes illuminating scenes at random through time and space, disappearing into an increasingly unfamiliar place.
By the final chapter we are in the Ediacaran, 550 million years ago. That's a long time back, nearly an eighth of the age of the universe. The pole star did not exist yet, nor did the stars of Orion; the moon was twelve thousand kilometres closer than it is today, and fifteen percent brighter, and the day itself was only twenty-two hours long, before friction slowed us down. It was a completely unknown, alien world. Yet macroscopic life was already on Earth, and had been there for a good 20 million years already: strange comb jellies, giant algae, wormlike bilaterians.
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.
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.
I find such ideas more exquisite than anything in religion, in fact I have tears in my eye just writing them out again now. And Halliday finds ways to draw such conclusions time and again � even when not related to the present day. Looking at the wing-markings of extinct kalligramatid butterflies, for instance, he notes the fact that wing-spots are often designed to mimic the eyes of apex predators, and distils this down to a beautiful idea: ‘Perhaps, preserved in the wings of ephemeral Oregramma, are some of the last mirrors to the gaze of a non-avian dinosaur.�
In a long and heartfelt epilogue, Halliday looks at the current ongoing extinction event and the course of climate change. Though the world has been much warmer in the past, he is wary of taking comfort in the comparison, since we are now carbonising the world at a rate which is, even in geological terms, completely unprecedented. At the same time, he warns, ‘we must not become despondent�. Cynicism and despair solve nothing, the choice is not between death or salvation, and everything that can be done to reduce the impact, flatten the curve, and slow the inevitable is important: ultimately, he maintains, the disaster‘is something we can manage� with theright personal and policy choices.
The more this message is rammed down people's throats the better, and the deep context offered for it by a book like this is, if sobering, enormously energising in the way that the truth so often is. Perhaps the overall message is that we cannot make decisions about the future � or even understand the present � without first knowing about the past. In the final analysis, ‘There is no separationof biology from history�.
January 10, 2022
Our planet’s past lies hidden under the dirt. It wears the scars of its formation and change in its crust, and it, too, is a mortuary, memorializing its inhabitants in stone, fossils acting as grave marker, mask and body. Those worlds, those otherlands, cannot be visited � at least, not in a physical sense. You can never visit the environments through which titanic dinosaurs strode, never walk on their soil nor swim in their water. The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth. 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.
In , paleobiologist Thomas Halliday skips backwards through time, visiting sixteen distinct eras from Earth’s history and describing the life, climate, and geological forces at work in each. This is cutting edge science � many of the earliest species can only be inferred by the slightest of impressions they left behind; many more will never make themselves known to us � and Halliday’s prose in describing his rebuilt worlds is comprehensive, evocative, and accessible. There’s always something humbling about confronting how unimportant our own species has been in the long history of the Earth, and as we are forced to acknowledge that we are driving the latest Great Extinction Event, I suppose there’s comfort in knowing that after we are gone, the Earth will diversify and other species will fill the Homo sapien niche. A fascinating read that makes the science come alive. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
To consider the landscapes that once existed is to feel the draw of a temporal wanderlust. My hope is that you will read this in the vein of a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space, and begin to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous yet familiar.
From the salt flats of a drained Mediterranean Sea to the lush forests of a tropical Antarctica, Halliday describes vanished worlds that are at once familiar and not. I highlighted dozens of passages in Otherlands � interesting factoids and nice bits of writing � but with the ease of copy/pasting from a digital ARC, I acknowledge that that would be far too much to put in a review. So, just to preserve some of my highlights, I’m putting a few behind spoiler tags:
This is now undoubtedly a human planet. It has not always been, and perhaps will not always be, but, for now, our species has an influence unlike almost any other biological force. The world as it is today is a direct result � not a conclusion or a denouement, but a result � of what has gone before. Much of life in the past happens in a steady state of slow-changing existence, but there are times when everything can become upended. Unavoidable impacts from space, eruptions at a continental scale, global glaciation � the all-pervasive transitions that force life’s structures to remodel themselves. Had any of those events happened in another way, or not happened at all, the then-unwritten future could have emerged very differently. It is by looking at the past that palaeobiologists, ecologists and climate scientists can address the uncertainty about the near- and long-term future of our planet, casting backwards to predict possible futures.
Reading about species that dominated their world for millions of years before some natural cataclysm wiped them out can be pretty demoralising, from the point-of-view of a species that’s only been around for a few hundred thousand years and is just starting to get the hang of how to best use these big brains. On the one hand, even if we pull together and concentrate on regenerating our environment, we’ve already wiped out the vast majority of large animals on the planet, climate change is threatening the rest (including us), and a supervolcano could blow up at literally any second; it’s easy to feel as helpless as a dinosaur in the path of the incoming Chicxulub meteor. But on the other hand, we are the wise ape, a part of nature and not separate from it, and we can use these big brains to learn lessons from the past and approach the future with more self-awareness than any dinosaur ever had. Halliday ends his trip through deep history on a hopeful note: change is inevitable, but our imminent extinction is not. Well worth the read.
November 3, 2024
Nature is not harmonious!
I happened to read Martin Amis’s novel last month, which describes a character’s life in reverse order, a fascinating but somewhat mixed experience. And in this non-fiction book Thomas Halliday (University of Birmingham) also uses the method of going back in time, but then applied to the evolution of living species on earth, in 16 steps from 20,000 years ago to 550 million years ago. I have to say that the author certainly has a skilled pen (this is sometimes more like docu-fiction than an academic work), and clearly knows his stuff. But the abundance of detail often makes it difficult to wade through. I admit that I certainly didn’t read everything, the text was so dense.
But that does not detract from the great value of this book. That of course lies primarily in the skilled reconstruction of biotopes and ecosystems from sometimes millions of years ago, with regular corrections to views that were held until recently (for example about the so-called Cambrian ‘’explosion’�, a sloppy 520 million years ago). But for me the value of this book particularly lies in the message for the present time. Halliday combats a number of superficial, mostly romanticizing myths about nature, such as the view that ecosystems are by definition balanced and harmonious. On the contrary, his story shows that these systems not only are extremely complex, but above all dynamic, constantly in motion. This also makes the conservation of ecosystems today (with for example the fight against exotic species) an ambiguous and even problematic issue, with an uncomfortable political undertone.
Halliday also makes a relevant comment on the special position of mankind, both in the anthropocentric version (man as lord and master of creation), as in the anti-humanist version (man as destroyer of the world): “Humanity is seen as an external force, something separate to the ideal of ‘nature�, which must be escaped to experience the wild, and something which can only wreak a destructive force on the world. To take this view is to deny the naturality of humanity. Ever since our emergence, we have been fighting our corner, exploiting our own ecological niche, part of which is as a modifier of habitats, an engineer of ecosystems, altering the worlds in which we find ourselves to suit our biological requirements.� I've recently read a couple of books on ecological history that start from the premisse that man is an outside force, destroying his surrounding environment. Of course, I get it why people look that way to the tremendous challenges we face today, but this view isn't offering sound solutions.
Finally, at the end of his book, Halliday also goes into great depth about what his reconstruction of past worlds brings to the challenging issues we face today: the accelerating extinction of species, the degradation of our biosphere, and the prospect of potentially catastrophic climate change. And that is more than relevant! More about that in my History account on ŷ: /review/show....
I happened to read Martin Amis’s novel last month, which describes a character’s life in reverse order, a fascinating but somewhat mixed experience. And in this non-fiction book Thomas Halliday (University of Birmingham) also uses the method of going back in time, but then applied to the evolution of living species on earth, in 16 steps from 20,000 years ago to 550 million years ago. I have to say that the author certainly has a skilled pen (this is sometimes more like docu-fiction than an academic work), and clearly knows his stuff. But the abundance of detail often makes it difficult to wade through. I admit that I certainly didn’t read everything, the text was so dense.
But that does not detract from the great value of this book. That of course lies primarily in the skilled reconstruction of biotopes and ecosystems from sometimes millions of years ago, with regular corrections to views that were held until recently (for example about the so-called Cambrian ‘’explosion’�, a sloppy 520 million years ago). But for me the value of this book particularly lies in the message for the present time. Halliday combats a number of superficial, mostly romanticizing myths about nature, such as the view that ecosystems are by definition balanced and harmonious. On the contrary, his story shows that these systems not only are extremely complex, but above all dynamic, constantly in motion. This also makes the conservation of ecosystems today (with for example the fight against exotic species) an ambiguous and even problematic issue, with an uncomfortable political undertone.
Halliday also makes a relevant comment on the special position of mankind, both in the anthropocentric version (man as lord and master of creation), as in the anti-humanist version (man as destroyer of the world): “Humanity is seen as an external force, something separate to the ideal of ‘nature�, which must be escaped to experience the wild, and something which can only wreak a destructive force on the world. To take this view is to deny the naturality of humanity. Ever since our emergence, we have been fighting our corner, exploiting our own ecological niche, part of which is as a modifier of habitats, an engineer of ecosystems, altering the worlds in which we find ourselves to suit our biological requirements.� I've recently read a couple of books on ecological history that start from the premisse that man is an outside force, destroying his surrounding environment. Of course, I get it why people look that way to the tremendous challenges we face today, but this view isn't offering sound solutions.
Finally, at the end of his book, Halliday also goes into great depth about what his reconstruction of past worlds brings to the challenging issues we face today: the accelerating extinction of species, the degradation of our biosphere, and the prospect of potentially catastrophic climate change. And that is more than relevant! More about that in my History account on ŷ: /review/show....
Read
August 14, 2024Honestly this needed to be about 50% pictures, including more and more detailed maps. The author tries to describe the various iterations of the world's flora and fauna, but a picture really would have been worth a thousand words. I also regretted the choice to go backwards rather than forwards in time, which I found extremely confusing at first and which removed any chance of commenting on continuities.
Basically I ran out of steam before I got into the early dinosaur bits, which is a crying shame, and I may return, but it was starting to feel like a bit of a chore. Oh well.
Basically I ran out of steam before I got into the early dinosaur bits, which is a crying shame, and I may return, but it was starting to feel like a bit of a chore. Oh well.
May 21, 2024
In recent years there has been a steady stream of books covering the development of life on earth, keying off, I think, our endless fascination with dinosaurs. Whether you’re 6 or 60, you can’t hide a curiosity about those creatures and the meteor strike that led to their extinction. Which introduces that trigger word: extinction. There have been five and we’re told we could be headed for a self-inflicted sixth. What could be more compelling?
Halliday’s book stands out in this crowd for two reasons. The first is the gimmick of moving backward in time over 14 chapters from the Pleistocene (20,000 years ago) to the Ediacaran (550 million years ago). More on that later. More importantly, IMO, is that it is beautifully written.
Halliday gives us a snapshot of each period by focusing on a geographic area where a large number of fossils representative of life at that time have been found. Taking off from there, he describes the concurrent development of continents and oceans and climate change, plants and animals.
It is the quality of those descriptions that held my attention. The word choice, the eye-opening analogies, the careful construction of an idea over the course of a paragraph - it’s just gorgeous. Here is a favorite example:
“To talk of the first humans is to hammer a signpost into an ancient river saying 'no humans beyond this point', no matter the ever flowing stream around its base. There is nothing essential to humanity, no single feature that intrinsically caused one creature to be human where its parents were not... However hard you try to define every point before the signpost as non-human, and every point after the post as human, the river flows continually.�
Returning to the overall structure of the book, I can’t say that I was a fan. Each section read like a thoughtful, informative essay, but overall it lacked forward momentum. It makes sense from the perspective of capturing an audience, because the plants and animals of the Pleistocene are far more interesting than the single-celled organisms of the Ediacaran. Had Halliday started there he may have lost some readers. That said, this reader would have preferred moving forward in time, where the descriptions of the re-development of life following extinction events would have flowed more naturally.
All in all, a first rate entry in this field. Recommended for anyone with an interest in the natural history of the planet.
Halliday’s book stands out in this crowd for two reasons. The first is the gimmick of moving backward in time over 14 chapters from the Pleistocene (20,000 years ago) to the Ediacaran (550 million years ago). More on that later. More importantly, IMO, is that it is beautifully written.
Halliday gives us a snapshot of each period by focusing on a geographic area where a large number of fossils representative of life at that time have been found. Taking off from there, he describes the concurrent development of continents and oceans and climate change, plants and animals.
It is the quality of those descriptions that held my attention. The word choice, the eye-opening analogies, the careful construction of an idea over the course of a paragraph - it’s just gorgeous. Here is a favorite example:
“To talk of the first humans is to hammer a signpost into an ancient river saying 'no humans beyond this point', no matter the ever flowing stream around its base. There is nothing essential to humanity, no single feature that intrinsically caused one creature to be human where its parents were not... However hard you try to define every point before the signpost as non-human, and every point after the post as human, the river flows continually.�
Returning to the overall structure of the book, I can’t say that I was a fan. Each section read like a thoughtful, informative essay, but overall it lacked forward momentum. It makes sense from the perspective of capturing an audience, because the plants and animals of the Pleistocene are far more interesting than the single-celled organisms of the Ediacaran. Had Halliday started there he may have lost some readers. That said, this reader would have preferred moving forward in time, where the descriptions of the re-development of life following extinction events would have flowed more naturally.
All in all, a first rate entry in this field. Recommended for anyone with an interest in the natural history of the planet.
April 13, 2022
5 Great Extinction events in the Earth’s history. I found this extremely comforting and reassuring—yes, if we screw it all up as humans—life finds a way.
90% 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.
This is the kinds of book that made me happy, how marvelous and beautiful, truly exquisite life is and how it tumbles along. It is awe inspiring. Plus, it had all these little tidbits in the day of life telling of major fossil finds being set down that Eureka! was said more than once. Things like chloroplasts are mutated cyanobacteria—it makes so much sense but I don’t remember knowing this.
Here are a few passages to give you a feel for the content:
I loaned this from my library, but I like this book so much that I want a copy.
No environment stays the same for ever, and if your niche disappears, extinction follows.
90% 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 kinds of book that made me happy, how marvelous and beautiful, truly exquisite life is and how it tumbles along. It is awe inspiring. Plus, it had all these little tidbits in the day of life telling of major fossil finds being set down that Eureka! was said more than once. Things like chloroplasts are mutated cyanobacteria—it makes so much sense but I don’t remember knowing this.
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.
At about the time the last Wrangel mammoths died, the Mesopotamian city of Uruk was ruled by Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king and protagonist of the oldest written story, one of the oldest works of literature in any form.
The rocks record a decline in the large carnivore number and diversity that peaks in intensity 2 million years before the present, just as the first species of Homo emerge from the Rift. The large carnivores that will survive to the present are the specialist meat-eaters—big cats, hyenas and wild dogs � that prey on large, dangerous herbivores. Those that will be lost � otters, a bear, giant civets � are mixed feeders on plants, mollusks, fish, fruit � precisely the niche that we will ultimately make our own.
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.
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.
The Triassic is a period of change and experimentation, a time on Earth when, to modern eyes, it would seem as if anything goes.
In part, this is probably thanks to the hangover from the mass extinction that occurred at the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods[…]
Every animal phylum that exists in modern day has its origins during the Cambrian or, in some cases, earlier.
I loaned this from my library, but I like this book so much that I want a copy.
October 27, 2022
I don’t usually write reviews of audiobooks, but I just want to let you guys know that this a beautifully written book about a very relevant and thought provoking subject matter. And the narration is sublime.
Just stunning.
I’m off now to buy a hardback copy.
Just stunning.
I’m off now to buy a hardback copy.
August 29, 2024
A captivating journey into past worlds. With each chapter, we travel back in time and visit the earth at a different point in its development, from the land of dinosaurs to mats of primordial ooze, and for each stage Halliday gives us a run down of the earths climate and the creatures inhabiting it.
A work with deep roots in science and with some mind bending ideas to assimilate - snowball earth anyone? - but also accessible to the general reader. What comes across most are the sheer diversity of life and its persistence in the face of steep challenges - from mega volcanoes to massive meteor strikes.
It provides assurance that life on Earth will prevail in the face of human induced global warming, whether mankind features in that future is up to us.
A work with deep roots in science and with some mind bending ideas to assimilate - snowball earth anyone? - but also accessible to the general reader. What comes across most are the sheer diversity of life and its persistence in the face of steep challenges - from mega volcanoes to massive meteor strikes.
It provides assurance that life on Earth will prevail in the face of human induced global warming, whether mankind features in that future is up to us.
August 18, 2023
What a trip! Through time, space, paleontology, evolution, geology, the dictionary... Other reviewers have used words like "beautiful," "spellbinding," "wonderful," and the book is indeed all these things and more. "Otherlands" takes the reader back through time, from the "recent" (Pleistocene -- 20,000 years ago in what is now Alaska) to the Ediacaran Period (550,000 years ago in what, going back through the breaking up and reshaping of continents, is now part of Australia). He examines how life (from the most basic to the creatures that inhabit the planet today), geography, and climate have changed, and why -- what forces (chemical, physical, biological, climatic) led to this or that outcome rather than another.
Halliday describes his book as an exploration of "the settings in which extinct creatures lived, settings that shaped them into the forms that now seem so unusual. It is an encyclopaedia of the possible, of landscapes that have disappeared, and this book is an attempt to bring those landscapes to life once more, to break from the dusty, iron-bound image of extinct organisms or the sensationalized, snarling, theme-park Tyrannosaurus, and to experience the reality of nature as one might today."
(Bam! Take that, Spielberg!)
He succeeds. My digital text is filled with colorful highlights of things that struck me. Things like how recent simple grass is: "There were never dinosaur grasslands, and, in the northern hemisphere, grass simply did not exist."
The book is a tour de force. And more than a little mind-blowing. Like this throw-away line that captures how inconceivably deep Time is: "More time passed between the lives of the last Diplodocus and the first Tyrannosaurus than passed between that of the last Tyrannosaurus and your birth." Similar observations center of geological features or bioligical structures or even weather patterns. Reading "Otherlands" is like watching the history (a word entirely inadequate for hundreds of millions of years) of the world unwinding in reverse: first as a world recognizably like our own, albeit with large and fearsome creatures, then back further and further until what is before us might as well be another planet altogether.
Among other things, I learned:
� 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.
� That there was a time -- something more than 5 million years ago (yesterday, as geological time goes) -- when the Mediterranean dried up and became, in the east, a lake. And how what is called the Zanclean flood (5.33 million years ago) opened the basin to the Atlantic Ocean, letting water in, a meter every two-and-a-half hours. The process created "the greatest waterfall ever to have graced the Earth. It [was] 1,500 metres � nearly a mile � high, one and a half times the height of the modern-day Angel Falls in Venezuela."
� That South America was once an island (it joined with North America 2.8 million years ago), and that much of what we take to be native South American wildlife actually came from Africa on downed trees and other accidental "rafts": Every monkey in the Amazonian rainforest, from spider monkeys to howler monkeys, tamarins to marmosets, owes its existence to a few lucky survivors from their own presumably difficult and traumatic ocean voyage. The distance to cross from Africa to South America at the time was considerably lower, about two thirds of the width of the modern Atlantic, but this is still a huge distance when relying on rain and pooled water in leaves for a supply of drinking water. Similarly, "All native South American rodents, from capybaras to agoutis to guinea pigs, are descended from a population that crossed a thousand miles of ocean and survived, also arriving at least by the late Eocene."
� That Earth's seasons have a cosmic origin quite different than what I had imagined: The annual rhythm that life settles into anywhere on the planet is a particular consequence of Earth’s early history. Careless collisions in the crowded solar system knocked the north–south axis off kilter. Without a lean, our orbit would be uniform, each day unchanging, our progress around the sun unmarked.
� That what is today Europe was, in the Jurassic period, "an archipelago. A series of islands up to about the size of modern-day Jamaica, separated by warm, shallow seas, the flooded margins of continents which here and there dive into deep oceanic trenches."
� 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."
� 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.
� That the planet was once home to "mammalian predators such as Repenomamus, a badger-sized carnivorous mammal, the largest in the Cretaceous world, known to catch and kill baby dinosaurs." And "Azhdarchid pterosaurs, the largest-ever living flyers, bigger and lighter than Orville and Wilbur Wright’s early aeroplanes, glided overhead." And horses the size of cats, Canadian camels, flightless geese, penguins that were more than 6 feet tall and weighed more than 260 pounds, and "short-faced" bears that were four times the size of an adult male grizzly bear. And similarly gargantuan otters.
� That words like these exist: regurgitalite (fossilized vomit) sharovipterygids, priapulids (" ‘penis worms�, named for their appearance"), chelicerates, trigonotarbid, anomalocaridids, cnidarian... I'll stop here. The spell-checker has raised a white flag.
I could go on. The book is eye-opening in every way. Halliday not only shows sides of the planet's past that are hardly known outside scientific circles, but also how these things are known and why they were the way they were. I found some parts of the book denser than others, and I wish there had been more illustrations, but the book is remarkably accessible. Halliday shows -- perhaps most importantly -- what all these facts and discoveries tell us about global climate change: the first child born in Antarctica was Emilio Marcos Palma (1978). There were at that time 2.5 times as many wild vertebrates as there are today. In barely 40 years -- "a geological snap of the fingers," as Halliday puts it, " we have lost more than half of the living individual vertebrates on the planet." One seemingly mundane put this in perspective for me: Sixty per cent of all birds on Earth today are from a single species -- domestic chickens.
Critically, in the final chapter Halliday brings it all together and urges us not to become "despondent. Human-induced change is, in itself, not new and, to a large extent, can be considered natural." We understand the why and the how and the what. What remains to be revealed is whether we can act on what we know.
Halliday describes his book as an exploration of "the settings in which extinct creatures lived, settings that shaped them into the forms that now seem so unusual. It is an encyclopaedia of the possible, of landscapes that have disappeared, and this book is an attempt to bring those landscapes to life once more, to break from the dusty, iron-bound image of extinct organisms or the sensationalized, snarling, theme-park Tyrannosaurus, and to experience the reality of nature as one might today."
(Bam! Take that, Spielberg!)
He succeeds. My digital text is filled with colorful highlights of things that struck me. Things like how recent simple grass is: "There were never dinosaur grasslands, and, in the northern hemisphere, grass simply did not exist."
The book is a tour de force. And more than a little mind-blowing. Like this throw-away line that captures how inconceivably deep Time is: "More time passed between the lives of the last Diplodocus and the first Tyrannosaurus than passed between that of the last Tyrannosaurus and your birth." Similar observations center of geological features or bioligical structures or even weather patterns. Reading "Otherlands" is like watching the history (a word entirely inadequate for hundreds of millions of years) of the world unwinding in reverse: first as a world recognizably like our own, albeit with large and fearsome creatures, then back further and further until what is before us might as well be another planet altogether.
Among other things, I learned:
� 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.
� That there was a time -- something more than 5 million years ago (yesterday, as geological time goes) -- when the Mediterranean dried up and became, in the east, a lake. And how what is called the Zanclean flood (5.33 million years ago) opened the basin to the Atlantic Ocean, letting water in, a meter every two-and-a-half hours. The process created "the greatest waterfall ever to have graced the Earth. It [was] 1,500 metres � nearly a mile � high, one and a half times the height of the modern-day Angel Falls in Venezuela."
� That South America was once an island (it joined with North America 2.8 million years ago), and that much of what we take to be native South American wildlife actually came from Africa on downed trees and other accidental "rafts": Every monkey in the Amazonian rainforest, from spider monkeys to howler monkeys, tamarins to marmosets, owes its existence to a few lucky survivors from their own presumably difficult and traumatic ocean voyage. The distance to cross from Africa to South America at the time was considerably lower, about two thirds of the width of the modern Atlantic, but this is still a huge distance when relying on rain and pooled water in leaves for a supply of drinking water. Similarly, "All native South American rodents, from capybaras to agoutis to guinea pigs, are descended from a population that crossed a thousand miles of ocean and survived, also arriving at least by the late Eocene."
� That Earth's seasons have a cosmic origin quite different than what I had imagined: The annual rhythm that life settles into anywhere on the planet is a particular consequence of Earth’s early history. Careless collisions in the crowded solar system knocked the north–south axis off kilter. Without a lean, our orbit would be uniform, each day unchanging, our progress around the sun unmarked.
� That what is today Europe was, in the Jurassic period, "an archipelago. A series of islands up to about the size of modern-day Jamaica, separated by warm, shallow seas, the flooded margins of continents which here and there dive into deep oceanic trenches."
� 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."
� 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.
� That the planet was once home to "mammalian predators such as Repenomamus, a badger-sized carnivorous mammal, the largest in the Cretaceous world, known to catch and kill baby dinosaurs." And "Azhdarchid pterosaurs, the largest-ever living flyers, bigger and lighter than Orville and Wilbur Wright’s early aeroplanes, glided overhead." And horses the size of cats, Canadian camels, flightless geese, penguins that were more than 6 feet tall and weighed more than 260 pounds, and "short-faced" bears that were four times the size of an adult male grizzly bear. And similarly gargantuan otters.
� That words like these exist: regurgitalite (fossilized vomit) sharovipterygids, priapulids (" ‘penis worms�, named for their appearance"), chelicerates, trigonotarbid, anomalocaridids, cnidarian... I'll stop here. The spell-checker has raised a white flag.
I could go on. The book is eye-opening in every way. Halliday not only shows sides of the planet's past that are hardly known outside scientific circles, but also how these things are known and why they were the way they were. I found some parts of the book denser than others, and I wish there had been more illustrations, but the book is remarkably accessible. Halliday shows -- perhaps most importantly -- what all these facts and discoveries tell us about global climate change: the first child born in Antarctica was Emilio Marcos Palma (1978). There were at that time 2.5 times as many wild vertebrates as there are today. In barely 40 years -- "a geological snap of the fingers," as Halliday puts it, " we have lost more than half of the living individual vertebrates on the planet." One seemingly mundane put this in perspective for me: Sixty per cent of all birds on Earth today are from a single species -- domestic chickens.
Critically, in the final chapter Halliday brings it all together and urges us not to become "despondent. Human-induced change is, in itself, not new and, to a large extent, can be considered natural." We understand the why and the how and the what. What remains to be revealed is whether we can act on what we know.
Read
October 23, 2024Though a history buff, for once I am going to go somewhat futuristic here. Not that this book by evolutionary biologist Thomas Halliday (University of Birmingham) predicts the future, on the contrary. But the merit of this book lies mainly in the fact that � by looking at the past � it gives us a better insight into the complexity of the challenges we face today (deterioration of the biosphere, extinction of species, climate change). In this book, Halliday does this by outlining the evolution of life on earth in 16 steps, from about 550 million years ago to 20,000 BP, albeit in reverse order.
Halliday believes in looking at the past to see scenarios for the future: "It is by looking at the past that palaeobiologists, ecologists and climate scientists can address the uncertainty about the near- and long-term future of our planet, casting backwards to predict possible futures." His chapters are regularly full of general reflections on the complexity and evolution of Earth's ecosystems, reflections that are extremely relevant for the future. There is a lot to be learned from past extinctions and collapses in particular: “In the complex game that is an ecosystem, every player is connected to some, but not all, others, a web not just of food but of competition, of who lives where, of light and shade, and of internal disputes within species. Extinction bursts through that web, breaking connections and its threatening integrity. Sever one strand, and it wavers, reshapes, but survives. Tear another, and it will still hold. Over long periods, repairs are made as species adapt, and new balances are reached, new associations made. If enough strands are broken at once, the web will collapse, drifting in the breeze, and the world will have to make do with what little remains. So, after a mass extinction event, a turnover happens, with new species appearing, the web self-repairing.�
Halliday does emphasize that in these processes of extinction and recovery the notion of time, in the sense of long duration (in practice usually millions of years), is extremely relevant. And therefore also in the current climate problem: “The uncertainty is not in the final temperature, only in the time it takes for the atmosphere to adjust, because the feedback systems of the planet’s environment ensure that there is a lag between reaching atmospheric stability and a final temperature plateau. The only way to ensure that we don’t reach these concentrations, and therefore these temperatures, is to reduce carbon emissions at a greater rate than is currently planned.�
Based on his research, the author is remarkably optimistic, albeit with an important warning: “Life recovers, and extinction is followed by diversification. That is, in its way, a comfort, but it is not the whole story. Recovery brings radical change, and often startlingly different worlds, into being, while also taking, at a minimum, tens of thousands of years. Recovery cannot replace what has been lost.� Yet he clearly believes in human agency: “We know what can happen during environmentally turbulent periods like the one in which we live. In mapping the past, we can predict the future, and find the routes that avert disaster. Where some disastrous outcomes are inevitable, we can plan for them, minimize the damage and mitigate them.� And for this, respect for our planet and its biosphere is an absolute condition: “For our long-term well-being as a species and as individuals, we must enter into a more mutualistic relationship with our global environments. Only then can we preserve not just their infinite variety, but also our place within them. Change, eventually, is inevitable, but we can let the planet take its own time, as we allow the shifting sands of geological time to lead us gently into the worlds of tomorrow. Sacrifice, an act of permanence. Then, we too will live in hope.� I'm not sure whether this outlook offers much comfort, but the way Halliday looks at the past to offer benchmarks for the future (and hence also the present) is inspiring, to say the least!
Halliday believes in looking at the past to see scenarios for the future: "It is by looking at the past that palaeobiologists, ecologists and climate scientists can address the uncertainty about the near- and long-term future of our planet, casting backwards to predict possible futures." His chapters are regularly full of general reflections on the complexity and evolution of Earth's ecosystems, reflections that are extremely relevant for the future. There is a lot to be learned from past extinctions and collapses in particular: “In the complex game that is an ecosystem, every player is connected to some, but not all, others, a web not just of food but of competition, of who lives where, of light and shade, and of internal disputes within species. Extinction bursts through that web, breaking connections and its threatening integrity. Sever one strand, and it wavers, reshapes, but survives. Tear another, and it will still hold. Over long periods, repairs are made as species adapt, and new balances are reached, new associations made. If enough strands are broken at once, the web will collapse, drifting in the breeze, and the world will have to make do with what little remains. So, after a mass extinction event, a turnover happens, with new species appearing, the web self-repairing.�
Halliday does emphasize that in these processes of extinction and recovery the notion of time, in the sense of long duration (in practice usually millions of years), is extremely relevant. And therefore also in the current climate problem: “The uncertainty is not in the final temperature, only in the time it takes for the atmosphere to adjust, because the feedback systems of the planet’s environment ensure that there is a lag between reaching atmospheric stability and a final temperature plateau. The only way to ensure that we don’t reach these concentrations, and therefore these temperatures, is to reduce carbon emissions at a greater rate than is currently planned.�
Based on his research, the author is remarkably optimistic, albeit with an important warning: “Life recovers, and extinction is followed by diversification. That is, in its way, a comfort, but it is not the whole story. Recovery brings radical change, and often startlingly different worlds, into being, while also taking, at a minimum, tens of thousands of years. Recovery cannot replace what has been lost.� Yet he clearly believes in human agency: “We know what can happen during environmentally turbulent periods like the one in which we live. In mapping the past, we can predict the future, and find the routes that avert disaster. Where some disastrous outcomes are inevitable, we can plan for them, minimize the damage and mitigate them.� And for this, respect for our planet and its biosphere is an absolute condition: “For our long-term well-being as a species and as individuals, we must enter into a more mutualistic relationship with our global environments. Only then can we preserve not just their infinite variety, but also our place within them. Change, eventually, is inevitable, but we can let the planet take its own time, as we allow the shifting sands of geological time to lead us gently into the worlds of tomorrow. Sacrifice, an act of permanence. Then, we too will live in hope.� I'm not sure whether this outlook offers much comfort, but the way Halliday looks at the past to offer benchmarks for the future (and hence also the present) is inspiring, to say the least!
Currently reading
August 15, 2024I am listening to the audiobook this time to find out if that type of learning touches other parts of my comprehension. This quotation jumped out at me discussing how extinction and succession work:
"Today, with the biodiversity crisis brought on by habitat destruction and fragmentation, combined with the ongoing effects of climate change, we are very familiar with the idea that more and more organisms are going extinct. It is frequently said that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. We are now used to hearing about widespread bleaching of coral reefs, melting of Arctic ice sheets, or deforestation in Indonesia and the Amazon basin. Less commonly discussed, though also extremely important, are the effects of land drainage on wetlands or the warming of tundra. The world that we inhabit is changing at the level of the landscape. The scale and ramifications of this are often difficult to comprehend. The thought that something as vast as the Great Barrier Reef, with all its vibrant diversity, might one day soon be gone, sounds inherently improbable. Yet the fossil record shows us that this sort of wholesale change is not only possible, but has repeatedly happened throughout Earth history.[8] Today’s reefs may be coral, but in the past clam-like molluscs, shelly brachiopods and even sponges have been reef-builders. Corals only took over as the dominant reef-building organisms when the mollusc reefs succumbed to the last mass extinction. Those reef-building clams originated in the Late Jurassic, taking over from the extensive sponge reefs, which had in turn filled the reef-building niche after brachiopod reefs were entirely wiped out by the end-Permian mass extinction. From the long-term perspective, continent-scale coral reefs might just end up being one of those ecosystems that never returns, a distinctively Cenozoic phenomenon, brought to a close by the human-driven mass extinction. Now, the future of coral reefs and other threatened ecosystems is in the balance, but the fossil record, in showing us how fast dominance can become obsolescence and loss, acts as a memorial and as a warning. Fossils may not seem like an obvious place to obtain insights into future life. The strangeness of fossil imprints, biological hieroglyphs, lends a distance to the past, a kind of uncrossable boundary, across which is an enticing other that can never be reached. The poet and academic Alice Tarbuck, in her poem ‘nature is taxonomy which all small bones resist� captures this distance, saying ‘give me leviathan trace, give me roiling sea-beast�. She yearns for ‘footprints that lead down centuries, into the basement of what might be�, and rejects the museum-label naming of classification with ‘Let nobody sing taxonomy�. Even as one of those who spend parts of their working life placing organisms in the series of phylum-class-order boxes, I too feel more of an affinity with the living thing than with the classification."
"Today, with the biodiversity crisis brought on by habitat destruction and fragmentation, combined with the ongoing effects of climate change, we are very familiar with the idea that more and more organisms are going extinct. It is frequently said that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. We are now used to hearing about widespread bleaching of coral reefs, melting of Arctic ice sheets, or deforestation in Indonesia and the Amazon basin. Less commonly discussed, though also extremely important, are the effects of land drainage on wetlands or the warming of tundra. The world that we inhabit is changing at the level of the landscape. The scale and ramifications of this are often difficult to comprehend. The thought that something as vast as the Great Barrier Reef, with all its vibrant diversity, might one day soon be gone, sounds inherently improbable. Yet the fossil record shows us that this sort of wholesale change is not only possible, but has repeatedly happened throughout Earth history.[8] Today’s reefs may be coral, but in the past clam-like molluscs, shelly brachiopods and even sponges have been reef-builders. Corals only took over as the dominant reef-building organisms when the mollusc reefs succumbed to the last mass extinction. Those reef-building clams originated in the Late Jurassic, taking over from the extensive sponge reefs, which had in turn filled the reef-building niche after brachiopod reefs were entirely wiped out by the end-Permian mass extinction. From the long-term perspective, continent-scale coral reefs might just end up being one of those ecosystems that never returns, a distinctively Cenozoic phenomenon, brought to a close by the human-driven mass extinction. Now, the future of coral reefs and other threatened ecosystems is in the balance, but the fossil record, in showing us how fast dominance can become obsolescence and loss, acts as a memorial and as a warning. Fossils may not seem like an obvious place to obtain insights into future life. The strangeness of fossil imprints, biological hieroglyphs, lends a distance to the past, a kind of uncrossable boundary, across which is an enticing other that can never be reached. The poet and academic Alice Tarbuck, in her poem ‘nature is taxonomy which all small bones resist� captures this distance, saying ‘give me leviathan trace, give me roiling sea-beast�. She yearns for ‘footprints that lead down centuries, into the basement of what might be�, and rejects the museum-label naming of classification with ‘Let nobody sing taxonomy�. Even as one of those who spend parts of their working life placing organisms in the series of phylum-class-order boxes, I too feel more of an affinity with the living thing than with the classification."
August 2, 2022
Just an all around informative read. I have always been interested in the evolution of our planet and the flora and fauna that have come and gone before us, so this one appealed to me from the get go. Halliday assigns one chapter for each period and epoch, starting with the most recent and working back to the Ediacaran epoch, which was roughly 500 million years from the present. Clean, straight forward prose helps the reader to not feel overwhelmed with the amount of information that Halliday passes along. I recommend reading the book rather than listening to the audio, as the maps are helpful and you'll want to see how to spell these animal names so you can google them as you read.
Solid four stars.
Solid four stars.
March 15, 2023
Lumea mea preferata este bazinul mediteraneean arid de acum 5-7 milioane de ani. Marea Mediterana seaca daca se inchide stramtoarea Gibraltar. Pentru ca se evapora de sapte ori mai multa apa decat intra in sistem prin rauri si precipitatii. Si nu dureaza mult, in jur de 1000 de ani, o clipa in timp geologic.
Ronul si Nilul au sapat canioane adanci pe versantul continental, insulele au devenit munti, iar din vechea mare nu a mai ramas dacat lacuri foarte sarate situate la 3 km sub nivelul marii. Vara, la aceste adancimi, temperatura aerului depasea 80 de grade Celsius, potrivita pentru organisme numite extremofile.
Acum un secol a fost propus un plan de inchidere cu baraje a stramtorii Gibraltar pentru a scadea nivelul Mediteranei si a folosi hidroenergia rezultata.
Ronul si Nilul au sapat canioane adanci pe versantul continental, insulele au devenit munti, iar din vechea mare nu a mai ramas dacat lacuri foarte sarate situate la 3 km sub nivelul marii. Vara, la aceste adancimi, temperatura aerului depasea 80 de grade Celsius, potrivita pentru organisme numite extremofile.
Acum un secol a fost propus un plan de inchidere cu baraje a stramtorii Gibraltar pentru a scadea nivelul Mediteranei si a folosi hidroenergia rezultata.
August 2, 2022
This book starts in the recent past and then takes us further back. A bit like Dawkin’s “the Ancestor’s tale�, except this author tries to explores the entire ecology around certain famous fossil sites. In parts quite fascinating. Like imagining what the world looked like without grass or trees. However, I found it a bit hard to follow on audio.
Shelved as 'skimmed'
March 29, 2022I was captivated by the premise and have enjoyed other books about deep time, but I quickly found that this was too dense with detail to hold my attention. It is a very impressive recreation of ancient ecosystems, however. I appreciated how Halliday finds parallels with our situation, acknowledging that the climate and spread of species have changed multiple times over the millennia, but noting that the speed and direction of the current changes are unprecedented and undeniably due to human behaviour. He is hopeful that technology can help us mitigate the environmental crisis, but only if we reduce consumption and move away from polluting energy.
May 16, 2023
The review I read was by celebrity paleontologist Steven Brusatte,
-- and that's the one you should read first, while I go through my notes ....
Excerpt:
"Otherlands is a Benjamin Button tale, which begins in the present day and runs in reverse, the evolution of life in rewind. He structures the narrative through an ecological lens: Each major division of geologic time is given a single chapter, which is focused on a single lost ecosystem. As you read along, Earth gets weirder and weirder, the creatures more alien, more removed from the norms and comforts of today. Soon enough, you find yourself underwater 550 million years ago, in what is now Australia, where fish and whales and corals are nothing but a future fantasy, as blobs of primitive cells leave ghostly impressions on the seafloor."
OK. 30 second summary: first-rate book by a working paleontologist who knows & loves his field. He writes well, too. My kind of book!
But not without flaws. The book is *seriously* under-illustrated. Each chapter gets just ONE line drawing of one critter, and a chapter-heading map of the earth's continental layout at that moment in geological time. Maddeningly, some of the index maps show the Equator and/or a Pole -- but some have neither. And, really, why no color plates? Budget?
Oh, and the Past-is-Now voice stays confusing, for the whole book. You'll just have to deal with it. I sorta-kinda got used to it, but then he would trip me up.....
Prereqs to read it: he intends none other than a basic science education -- but I think you will get more from the book if you had a class in Historical Geology in college, or are well-read.
"Life finds a way." A constant theme in the book. Geological time goes back a long, long way: the book discusses, in some detail, the history of life for the past 550 million years. Which is pretty much when he ends his history, even though the history of life on Earth goes all the way back to (at least) 3.5 billion years ago. And he does tell you some of the big events back then: the Oxygen Revolution! Which precipitated a LONG series of Snowball Earth episodes, with giant glaciers riding out over the ice-cap, and equatorial glaciers! But it's hard to keep a good microbe colony down, thank heavens. ...
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.
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!
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.
Ediacarian fossils: the first known multi-cellular life, some 550 million years back. Discovered in 1956 by an alert 15 y.o. Canadian girl, who had trouble getting anyone to notice.
So. I had a lot of fun with this one, learned a lot, enjoyed it even with the frustrations I've already mentioned. 4.5 stars, rounded up. If I find fixes online, I'll post them.
-- and that's the one you should read first, while I go through my notes ....
Excerpt:
"Otherlands is a Benjamin Button tale, which begins in the present day and runs in reverse, the evolution of life in rewind. He structures the narrative through an ecological lens: Each major division of geologic time is given a single chapter, which is focused on a single lost ecosystem. As you read along, Earth gets weirder and weirder, the creatures more alien, more removed from the norms and comforts of today. Soon enough, you find yourself underwater 550 million years ago, in what is now Australia, where fish and whales and corals are nothing but a future fantasy, as blobs of primitive cells leave ghostly impressions on the seafloor."
OK. 30 second summary: first-rate book by a working paleontologist who knows & loves his field. He writes well, too. My kind of book!
But not without flaws. The book is *seriously* under-illustrated. Each chapter gets just ONE line drawing of one critter, and a chapter-heading map of the earth's continental layout at that moment in geological time. Maddeningly, some of the index maps show the Equator and/or a Pole -- but some have neither. And, really, why no color plates? Budget?
Oh, and the Past-is-Now voice stays confusing, for the whole book. You'll just have to deal with it. I sorta-kinda got used to it, but then he would trip me up.....
Prereqs to read it: he intends none other than a basic science education -- but I think you will get more from the book if you had a class in Historical Geology in college, or are well-read.
"Life finds a way." A constant theme in the book. Geological time goes back a long, long way: the book discusses, in some detail, the history of life for the past 550 million years. Which is pretty much when he ends his history, even though the history of life on Earth goes all the way back to (at least) 3.5 billion years ago. And he does tell you some of the big events back then: the Oxygen Revolution! Which precipitated a LONG series of Snowball Earth episodes, with giant glaciers riding out over the ice-cap, and equatorial glaciers! But it's hard to keep a good microbe colony down, thank heavens. ...
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.
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!
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.
Ediacarian fossils: the first known multi-cellular life, some 550 million years back. Discovered in 1956 by an alert 15 y.o. Canadian girl, who had trouble getting anyone to notice.
So. I had a lot of fun with this one, learned a lot, enjoyed it even with the frustrations I've already mentioned. 4.5 stars, rounded up. If I find fixes online, I'll post them.
December 28, 2023
<4� 🪱 🪲🌿🦕
An Audible copy of this book was purchased and I took my time getting through it.
I also spaced on a lot of content as my mind wanders with audios, especially at bedtime, proof of which is in reviews from others who brought to life sections obviously missed.
Some credit for my lure into the sleep world goes to the excellent and pleasurable narration by Adetomiwa Edun.
Still, for the times I was fully present and paying attention, this was a spectacular journey and one which I will revisit time and again in the hopes of experiencing what I missed. The format the author used walking the reader back in time was effective but it’s also the kind of book you can pick up and read out of sequence after the fact anytime it strikes your fancy.
The lush prose beckons you into ancient primordial otherlands.
I kept wishing for a big picture book of illustrations. Possibly deserving of 5 stars if I had been more mindful taking it all in.
An Audible copy of this book was purchased and I took my time getting through it.
I also spaced on a lot of content as my mind wanders with audios, especially at bedtime, proof of which is in reviews from others who brought to life sections obviously missed.
Some credit for my lure into the sleep world goes to the excellent and pleasurable narration by Adetomiwa Edun.
Still, for the times I was fully present and paying attention, this was a spectacular journey and one which I will revisit time and again in the hopes of experiencing what I missed. The format the author used walking the reader back in time was effective but it’s also the kind of book you can pick up and read out of sequence after the fact anytime it strikes your fancy.
The lush prose beckons you into ancient primordial otherlands.
I kept wishing for a big picture book of illustrations. Possibly deserving of 5 stars if I had been more mindful taking it all in.
August 9, 2022
I really enjoy watching nature documentaries about different animals and climates as well as science programs about the origins of the universe and the growing field of astrobiology. “Otherlands� is like a unique combination of these different scientific surveys. It examines several eras of Earth itself to provide a guided tour which stretches back to the origins of life. We start by viewing a specific region from 20,000 years ago and end up in a location 550 million years ago so that our own planet appears increasingly alien. From this vantage point the history of humans looks very small indeed. Halliday takes care not only to highlight particular plants, microorganisms and other living creatures which look increasingly peculiar the further back we go, but how the ecosystems of different eras worked as a whole given the geological makeup and weather conditions of the time. From this vantage point we can see how systems of life have come and gone on our planet, the staggered methods by which different lifeforms have evolved over time and how examining these things might show us what will happen to humankind in the future with the advent of climate change. It's an awe-inspiring journey which draws upon archeological evidence to transport the reader deep into the history of our planet.
I was drawn to reading this book after it was shortlisted for this year's for Nature Writing. The narrative is written in a highly personable style which made me as curious about what we're being shown as the author evidently felt in studying and recreating a picture of these different eras. Read my full
I was drawn to reading this book after it was shortlisted for this year's for Nature Writing. The narrative is written in a highly personable style which made me as curious about what we're being shown as the author evidently felt in studying and recreating a picture of these different eras. Read my full
April 19, 2022
I always struggle to rate science nonfiction, as I am not a scientist, just an interested amateur. In my reading progress, I have put in several interesting bits from each chapter, to give interested readers a taste of the author’s brilliant, evocative writing style. I can see why he has won awards for his work!
Briefly, the interesting premise of the book is Halliday gives us a fascinating tour of sixteen fossil sites, going further back each chapter into deep time, over half a billion years. Each chapter is an epoch at the site, i.e., chapter 1 is “Northern Plain, Alaska, USA, Pleistocene - 20,000 years ago�, and the last is “Ediacara Hills, Australia, Ediacaran - 550 million years ago�. He covers what the environment would have felt like - hot, cold, sunny, stormy, humid, what kind of animals one might see, whether there were trees, bugs, flowers, and what they might look like.
The Epilogue was, to me, very encouraging- after seeing how long there has been life on Earth without us humans, and how we are but a blip in geological deep time, I was feeling less than optimistic for us! But he points out how unhelpful it is to broadcast opinions like “we have two years, or five years, and if we don’t do A, B, and C, we’ll all perish!� With a wealth of decency, rationality and humanity, he points out the fossil record is there for us to see past catastrophic extinction events, and the effects of climate changes. We don’t have to to get it perfect, and if we do absolutely nothing and carry on business as usual it will be devastating for a lot of people, and we can’t reverse time and get extinct species back. But he says the planet is pretty adaptable, and likely to carry on as it has for millions of years, with or without us.
Briefly, the interesting premise of the book is Halliday gives us a fascinating tour of sixteen fossil sites, going further back each chapter into deep time, over half a billion years. Each chapter is an epoch at the site, i.e., chapter 1 is “Northern Plain, Alaska, USA, Pleistocene - 20,000 years ago�, and the last is “Ediacara Hills, Australia, Ediacaran - 550 million years ago�. He covers what the environment would have felt like - hot, cold, sunny, stormy, humid, what kind of animals one might see, whether there were trees, bugs, flowers, and what they might look like.
The Epilogue was, to me, very encouraging- after seeing how long there has been life on Earth without us humans, and how we are but a blip in geological deep time, I was feeling less than optimistic for us! But he points out how unhelpful it is to broadcast opinions like “we have two years, or five years, and if we don’t do A, B, and C, we’ll all perish!� With a wealth of decency, rationality and humanity, he points out the fossil record is there for us to see past catastrophic extinction events, and the effects of climate changes. We don’t have to to get it perfect, and if we do absolutely nothing and carry on business as usual it will be devastating for a lot of people, and we can’t reverse time and get extinct species back. But he says the planet is pretty adaptable, and likely to carry on as it has for millions of years, with or without us.
August 22, 2022
An amazing ebook that pulled me into ancient times. It felt like I was right there with the author, observing everything. The book includes some illustrations of creatures and maps, for example, of Pangea. But the visuals were small on the ebook so I continually searched for more pictures online and watched some cool videos of the moving, colliding continents.
A few examples of the many weird and wonderful creatures mentioned: the arachnid palaeochrinus, the long-necked tanystropheus, and the tullimonstrum (Tully Monster) with antennae-eyes protruding from its back.
One caveat: the book is dense with details and requires some patience to finish. I put it aside several times and had to check it out again.
But it was very worthwhile and is highly recommended.
A few examples of the many weird and wonderful creatures mentioned: the arachnid palaeochrinus, the long-necked tanystropheus, and the tullimonstrum (Tully Monster) with antennae-eyes protruding from its back.
One caveat: the book is dense with details and requires some patience to finish. I put it aside several times and had to check it out again.
But it was very worthwhile and is highly recommended.
August 24, 2022
The book is very hard to read if you don't have a background on this topic. The writing is uselessly challenging. The Epilogue was instead a nice chapter and I wished he wrote the entire book like that. I believe he tried too hard to create a book that sounded magical with its descriptions of the earth's history, he tried to sound poetical and I didn't find it very helpful. Many many names of animals and plants... Maybe just not my type of book, but I was hoping to learn more from this book.
May 20, 2023
Paleobiologist Thomas Halliday takes us on a tour of 16 fossil sites that date from the most recent Ice Age back (almost) to the origin of life on Earth. Using the latest scientific discoveries and analysis, he extrapolates what is known about each site into a deeply researched and vividly rendered glimpse of life on Earth as it may have looked, with a novelist's flair for detail.
A stunning look back into the deep past.
A stunning look back into the deep past.
March 15, 2022
Otherlands is a spellbinding tour of extinct worlds while its carefully crafted yet poetic reflections on evolution and deep time are a masterclass in science communication. Read my full review at
July 28, 2022
Un libro que nos adentra en los ecosistemas del pasado, dando lugar a una reflexión sobre nuestro presente y futuro.
Nunca se me ha dado bien la biología, se podría decir que prácticamente es un tema que domino poco o nada. Aunque siempre me ha fascinado, tengo que reconocer que no es precisamente mi fuerte, en absoluto, a pesar de todo eso he logrado entender perfectamente el libro y la descripción de los diferentes ecosistemas que se narran, si, efectivamente, son narrados más que contados de una forma estrictamente académica.
Es algo así como colocarse en cada uno de los ecosistemas del pasado, con su fauna, su flora, su geografía, su clima, sus desastres y sus extinciones. Al ser humano siempre nos ha fascinado el pasado, ya sea bien el pasado de la tierra o el pasado de nuestra historia como raza humana o incluso, el pasado ficticio, partiendo de la base de la curiosidad, termina por revelarse prácticamente fotografías de aquellos ecosistemas, concluyendo el libro con una reflexión bastante esclarecedora sobre el peligro al que nos enfrentamos en el presente ecosistema, un peligro inevitable del todo, pero si falible en muchos sentidos.
Un libro que no es más que un reclamo para la consciencia, para desentrañar los misterios de un ecosistema que nos rodea y lo suficientemente frágil como para depender de pocos factores, por los cuales se puede desencadenar el desastre.
Llama a la reflexión del pasado y cambia totalmente la idea que teníamos de aquellos ecosistemas, dando un poco de luz a una oscuridad sobre los tiempos pretéritos.
Nunca se me ha dado bien la biología, se podría decir que prácticamente es un tema que domino poco o nada. Aunque siempre me ha fascinado, tengo que reconocer que no es precisamente mi fuerte, en absoluto, a pesar de todo eso he logrado entender perfectamente el libro y la descripción de los diferentes ecosistemas que se narran, si, efectivamente, son narrados más que contados de una forma estrictamente académica.
Es algo así como colocarse en cada uno de los ecosistemas del pasado, con su fauna, su flora, su geografía, su clima, sus desastres y sus extinciones. Al ser humano siempre nos ha fascinado el pasado, ya sea bien el pasado de la tierra o el pasado de nuestra historia como raza humana o incluso, el pasado ficticio, partiendo de la base de la curiosidad, termina por revelarse prácticamente fotografías de aquellos ecosistemas, concluyendo el libro con una reflexión bastante esclarecedora sobre el peligro al que nos enfrentamos en el presente ecosistema, un peligro inevitable del todo, pero si falible en muchos sentidos.
Un libro que no es más que un reclamo para la consciencia, para desentrañar los misterios de un ecosistema que nos rodea y lo suficientemente frágil como para depender de pocos factores, por los cuales se puede desencadenar el desastre.
Llama a la reflexión del pasado y cambia totalmente la idea que teníamos de aquellos ecosistemas, dando un poco de luz a una oscuridad sobre los tiempos pretéritos.
July 23, 2022
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.
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.
Each chapter, which is devoted to an era starting nearest in time to ours and working backwards, is titled with a single thematic word, like "Deluge" (Miocene), "Contingency" (Triassic) or "Emergence" (Ediacaran). (The author also offers his acknowledgements in reverse chronological order, which made me chuckle.) Each chapter also begins with two quotes, drawn from different literary sources. What follows is somewhat dense, descriptive prose that evokes a few examples of signature species or actions of the time period.
Very shortly after starting to read this I thought to myself, "This is earth science for lit fic fans."
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.
But oh sweet weeping Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I swung back and forth between wanting to cry and being incredibly frustrated that I couldn't better visualize the worlds Halliday was describing. He may not use jargon but he names all sort of plants I have no idea how they look? And rocks? And while I understand the difficulty of describing long-extinct species, aside from the dinosaurs we're all familiar with, those Latin names really don't evoke any images for me.
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!
In fact I started reading this as an ebook and it was such slow going that I had to check the physical book out of the library to inspire me to keep going. There's a positive and a negative to such a pace: the positive being that it's definitely possible to read a chapter at a time and ruminate on it - in fact that's advised by this reader. If you have a favorite era, I suppose you could also start there, or just read them at random. You don't need to know what happened in the Devonian before you read the Silurian, from the way Halliday writes it, lol.
If the book is leading to anything, it's the Epilogue, which surprisingly-but-also-not-surprisingly tackles human-created climate change and its impact on our current era. Halliday is not preachy while still definitively framing a call to action. He has a poetic way to offer it to us as well: "Sacrifice, an act of permanence." I suppose it's the first time I've felt inspired while reflecting on what we will all need to do to ensure survival.
This book is a journey. If you're ready for it (and ideally with a better imagination than mine!) there's plenty of rewards throughout.
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.
Each chapter, which is devoted to an era starting nearest in time to ours and working backwards, is titled with a single thematic word, like "Deluge" (Miocene), "Contingency" (Triassic) or "Emergence" (Ediacaran). (The author also offers his acknowledgements in reverse chronological order, which made me chuckle.) Each chapter also begins with two quotes, drawn from different literary sources. What follows is somewhat dense, descriptive prose that evokes a few examples of signature species or actions of the time period.
Very shortly after starting to read this I thought to myself, "This is earth science for lit fic fans."
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.
But oh sweet weeping Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I swung back and forth between wanting to cry and being incredibly frustrated that I couldn't better visualize the worlds Halliday was describing. He may not use jargon but he names all sort of plants I have no idea how they look? And rocks? And while I understand the difficulty of describing long-extinct species, aside from the dinosaurs we're all familiar with, those Latin names really don't evoke any images for me.
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!
In fact I started reading this as an ebook and it was such slow going that I had to check the physical book out of the library to inspire me to keep going. There's a positive and a negative to such a pace: the positive being that it's definitely possible to read a chapter at a time and ruminate on it - in fact that's advised by this reader. If you have a favorite era, I suppose you could also start there, or just read them at random. You don't need to know what happened in the Devonian before you read the Silurian, from the way Halliday writes it, lol.
If the book is leading to anything, it's the Epilogue, which surprisingly-but-also-not-surprisingly tackles human-created climate change and its impact on our current era. Halliday is not preachy while still definitively framing a call to action. He has a poetic way to offer it to us as well: "Sacrifice, an act of permanence." I suppose it's the first time I've felt inspired while reflecting on what we will all need to do to ensure survival.
This book is a journey. If you're ready for it (and ideally with a better imagination than mine!) there's plenty of rewards throughout.
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April 8, 2022Read 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:
"The pouched metatherians, the progenitors of marsupials, used to be common over North America. Now only a few survive here. Eventually, they too will be restricted to the south. Two other unusual insectivorous mammal groups, the sprawling symmetrodonts with their piercing triangular molars and ankle spurs, and dryostelids, animals like spineless hedgehogs, may have survived. The only symmetrodont is a controversial specimen named Chronoperates, the time wandered, a late paleocene tooth from a Mesozoic group. A dog sized dryolestid, Peligrotherium, the lazy beast, is known from the early Paleocene of Patagonia, while another, necrolestes, the 'grave robber', from the same part of the world, but much later in the Miocene. A mole-like burrower with a sensitive snouth, Necrolestes is so highly specialized that the group it belongs to remains uncertain, while Peligrotherium has been thought to be a placental mammal by some."
With no exaggeration did I say that this is a random sample and that this is accessible. At least some words remained intelligible. With other passages I wasn't so lucky. Take this paragraph, ratchet up the statistic of species references, and multiply it by 300-odd pages, and there one can have an idea of this sprawling book. There's like 10 pictures to prevent the reader from drowning in the sea of references-- actual dinosaur and history-of-life textbooks have more pictures. Hats off to the author for the fantastic level of research and loving detail that went into this book, but the level of granularity was beyond my competence level. I'll watch the documentary version when it comes, it'll surely be incredible.
"The pouched metatherians, the progenitors of marsupials, used to be common over North America. Now only a few survive here. Eventually, they too will be restricted to the south. Two other unusual insectivorous mammal groups, the sprawling symmetrodonts with their piercing triangular molars and ankle spurs, and dryostelids, animals like spineless hedgehogs, may have survived. The only symmetrodont is a controversial specimen named Chronoperates, the time wandered, a late paleocene tooth from a Mesozoic group. A dog sized dryolestid, Peligrotherium, the lazy beast, is known from the early Paleocene of Patagonia, while another, necrolestes, the 'grave robber', from the same part of the world, but much later in the Miocene. A mole-like burrower with a sensitive snouth, Necrolestes is so highly specialized that the group it belongs to remains uncertain, while Peligrotherium has been thought to be a placental mammal by some."
With no exaggeration did I say that this is a random sample and that this is accessible. At least some words remained intelligible. With other passages I wasn't so lucky. Take this paragraph, ratchet up the statistic of species references, and multiply it by 300-odd pages, and there one can have an idea of this sprawling book. There's like 10 pictures to prevent the reader from drowning in the sea of references-- actual dinosaur and history-of-life textbooks have more pictures. Hats off to the author for the fantastic level of research and loving detail that went into this book, but the level of granularity was beyond my competence level. I'll watch the documentary version when it comes, it'll surely be incredible.
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