A brilliant series of reconstructions of life in the deep past, richly imagined from the fine details of the fossil record... A real achievement... Reading Halliday's book is as near to the experience of visiting these ancient worlds as you are likely to get Jon Turney Arts Desk Halliday, T. (2022) Otherlands: A journey through Earth's extinct worlds. New York, NY: Random House. 283 pp. ISBN:9780593132883 This is a piece of nature writing that covers millions of years, from the very start of evolution, while capturing the almost unthinkable ways geography has shifted and changed over time. Epic in scope and executed with charming enthusiasm, Otherlands looks set to be a big talking point for fans of non-fiction in 2022" 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." A stirring, eye-opening journey into deep time, from the Ice Age to the first appearance of microbial life 550 million years ago, by a brilliant young paleobiologist." [4]

McConnachie, James. "Otherlands by Thomas Halliday review — an extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth". The Sunday Times . Retrieved 2022-08-28.This message is, by now, one we are used to hearing. For me, the most distinctive feature of the book is the way that Halliday chooses to describe the past. He encourages us to treat his writings like “a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space”. This provides a sense of adventure and exploration where we see “short willows write wordless calligraphy in the wind” 20,000 years ago, or walk across “centuries-old mattresses of conifer needles” 41 million years ago. This is the past as we've never seen it before. Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. 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." Each cell is semi-independent, and a single sponge blurs the line between individual and colony. If you were to put one in a blender, it would re-aggregate — a different shape, but still a working organism, a functioning sponge. The relevant references are collected paragraph by paragraph in endnotes. One minor annoyance is that Halliday omits the titles of journal articles, which I normally find the most informative bit. No doubt done to save space, I cannot imagine this will bother many people.

By studying the distant past, Halliday can envision prospective climate change scenarios. Depending on how much CO 2is emitted, the Earthcould very well be heading towards Eocene-temperature levels far faster than any underlying long term paleontology-cycle would suggest. 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. Writing with gusto and bravado [...] Halliday has honed a unique voice [...] Otherlands is a verbal feast. You feel like you are there on the Mammoth Steppe, some 20,000 years ago, as frigid winds blow off the glacial front [...] Along the way, we learn astounding facts" Palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday embraces a yet more epic timescale in Otherlands: A World in the Making, touring the many living worlds that preceded ours, from the mammoth steppe in glaciated Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica. If you have ever wondered what sound a pterosaur's wings made in flight, this is the book for you" 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."

Retailers:

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. A bracing pleasure for Earth-science buffs and readers interested in diving into deep history." [5] 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. A brilliant series of reconstructions of life in the deep past, richly imagined from the fine details of the fossil record [...] A real achievement [...] Reading Halliday's book is as near to the experience of visiting these ancient worlds as you are likely to get" A fascinating journey through Earth's history [...] [Halliday] is appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy [...] To read Otherlands is to marvel not only at these unfamiliar lands and creatures, but also that we have the science to bring them to life in such vivid detail"

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. The Triassic is a period of change and experimentation, a time on Earth when, to modern eyes, it would seem as if anything goes. 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.” 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. Particularly powerful are his reflections on deep time. A recurrent theme in this book is that of impermanence: "gatherings of species in time and space may give the illusion of stability, but these communities can only last as long as the conditions that help to create them persist" (p. 18). Some ecosystems never return. The long-lived Jurassic crinoid colonies (155 mya) that made a home on floating logs blown into the sea during storms disappeared when the evolution of shipworms made "this way of life impossible, something that can and will never be replicated in quite the same way again; wood just doesn't float for as long as it used to" (p. 151). And while the world feels old in our day, it is easy to forget the world was already old in the deep past. The mountains of the Triassic (225 mya) "are built from the deep sea", within which can be seen "the coils and shapes of the long-extinct creatures of the Carboniferous seas, well over 100 million years old even now" (p. 158).inquisitivebiologist (2022-03-15). "Book review – Otherlands: A World in the Making". The Inquisitive Biologist . Retrieved 2022-08-28. Writing with gusto and bravado [...] Halliday has honed a unique voice... Otherlands is a verbal feast. You feel like you are there on the Mammoth Steppe, some 20,000 years ago, as frigid winds blow off the glacial front... Along the way, we learn astounding facts Steve Brusatte Scientific American