What would it be like to experience the ancient landscapes of the past as we experience the reality of nature today? To actually visit the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among their spectacular flora and fauna, to witness their continental shifts? In Otherlands, the multi-talented palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a breath-taking up close encounter with worlds that are normally unimaginably distant.
Journeying backwards in time from the most recent Ice Age to the dawn of complex life itself, and across all seven continents, Halliday immerses us in sixteen lost ecosystems, each one rendered with a novelist's eye for detail and drama. Every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the shambling rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in fact. We visit the birthplace of humanity on the shores of the great lake Lonyumun, in …
What would it be like to experience the ancient landscapes of the past as we experience the reality of nature today? To actually visit the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among their spectacular flora and fauna, to witness their continental shifts? In Otherlands, the multi-talented palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a breath-taking up close encounter with worlds that are normally unimaginably distant.
Journeying backwards in time from the most recent Ice Age to the dawn of complex life itself, and across all seven continents, Halliday immerses us in sixteen lost ecosystems, each one rendered with a novelist's eye for detail and drama. Every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the shambling rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in fact. We visit the birthplace of humanity on the shores of the great lake Lonyumun, in Pliocene-era Kenya; in the Miocene, we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the world has ever known as it fills the evaporated Mediterranean Sea; we encounter forests of giant fungus nine metres tall in Devonian-era Scotland; and we gaze at the light of a full and enormous moon in the Ediacaran sky, when life hasn't yet reached land.
To read Otherlands is to time travel, to see the last 550 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fantastical and familiar.
Admittedly another book that we fell asleep to, but also good enough to want to go back to bits we missed. I enjoyed time travelling and my favourite bit was imaginings ancient mountain ranges and recognising where they are now. Weirdly made me feel more connected with the world.
Admittedly another book that we fell asleep to, but also good enough to want to go back to bits we missed.
I enjoyed time travelling and my favourite bit was imaginings ancient mountain ranges and recognising where they are now. Weirdly made me feel more connected with the world.
I really enjoyed this book. It is packed with science but presents in a well-organized and interesting way. Zooming through eras and eons it does not try to be comprehensive in its telling but focuses on a number of narrative threads. The approach is unique and refreshing and in the end an enjoyable ride.
Despite the lack of visual aids in the audiobook rendition, this book still stirred the pot of nascent geological interest in me. The eras get jumbled together but the scenes painted from the most astute inferences of the fossil record have stuck. Recommended to all those who live in this world inhabited by the ghosts of those pre-anthropological creatures both mighty and minute
