OTHERLANDS by Thomas Halliday
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. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.
Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description – whether the colour of a beetle’s shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air – is grounded in the fossil record.
Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life – yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.
‘Deep time is very hard to capture–even to imagine–and yet Thomas Halliday has done so inthis fascinating volume. He wears his grasp of vast scientific learning lightly; this is as close to time travel as you are likely to get.’ – Bill McKibben
‘Thomas Halliday’s debut is a kaleidoscopic and evocative journey into deep time. He takes quiet fossil records and complex scientific research and brings them alive – riotous, full–coloured and three–dimensional. You’ll find yourself next to giant two–metre penguins in a forested Antarctica 41 million years ago or hearing singing icebergs in South Africa some 444 million years ago. Maybe most importantly, Otherlands is a timely reminder of our planet’s impermanence and what we can learn from the past.’ – Andrea Wulf
‘An absolutely gripping adventure story, Otherlands is science writing at its very finest.’ – Lewis Dartnell
‘A dizzying and beautifully written journey through time.’ – Tom Holland
‘Full of wonder and fascination, exquisitely written, this is time travel of spectacular
dimensions – a journey into our planet’s evolution and the world in which we live. A
compellingly important read.’ – Isabella Tree
