Assembling the whole set is a real achievement. Composing any one of them calls for an impressive synthesis. Otherlands offers more finely drawn vignettes of past life than either. Halliday’s effort compares well with other tales of Earth history. It has rarely been so vividly illustrated. It’s a commonplace idea since evolution became the accepted theory of how the biological world developed across our planet, or any planet. Both omissions align with Halliday’s main goal, which is to give a sense of past organisms framed in ways of living that are part of a complete ecosystem. The exposition is also mercifully light on the cliches of Attenborough-style narration, where every scene seems to be either a mating opportunity or a meal. There are passing hints of how particular fossils were formed, and why specific locations yielded a rich haul, but the details are passed by – if you wan that kind of thing you will have to follow up the extensive notes. 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.A brilliant series of reconstructions of life in the deep past, richly imagined from the fine details of 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. 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. 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.Īward-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas 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. Otherlands is his first book, and is a transporting and immersive exploration of past life. He has held research positions at University College London and the University of Birmingham, and has been part of palaeontological field crews in Argentina and India. This is the past as we've never seen it before. Thomas Halliday is a palaeobiologist and evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh. A book of almost unimaginable riches' Sunday Times 'The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read' Tom Holland WATERSTONES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONĪ BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SUNDAY TIMES, TELEGRAPH, PROSPECT, THE NEW YORKER AND BBC HISTORY THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING - HIGHLY COMMENDED

Otherlands by thomas halliday