Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds

by Thomas Halliday Narrated by Adetomiwa Edun

Overview

“Immersive . . . bracingly ambitious . . . rewinds the story of life on Earth-from the mammoth steppe of the last Ice Age to the dawn of multicellular creatures over 500 million years ago.”-The Economist

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE ¿ “One of those rare books that's both deeply informative and daringly imaginative.”-Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Prospect (UK)

The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life on the page.

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. It takes us from the savannahs of Pliocene Kenya to watch a python chase a group of australopithecines into an acacia tree; to a cliff overlooking the salt pans of the empty basin of what will be the Mediterranean Sea just as water from the Miocene Atlantic Ocean spills in; into the tropical forests of Eocene Antarctica; and under the shallow pools of Ediacaran Australia, where we glimpse the first microbial life.

Otherlands also offers us a vast perspective on the current state of the planet. The thought that something as vast as the Great Barrier Reef, for example, with all its vibrant diversity, might one day soon be gone sounds improbable. But the fossil record shows us that this sort of wholesale change is not only possible but has repeatedly happened throughout Earth history.

Even as he operates on this broad canvas, Halliday brings us up close to the intricate relationships that defined these lost worlds. In novelistic prose that belies the breadth of his research, he illustrates how ecosystems are formed; how species die out and are replaced; and how species migrate, adapt, and collaborate. It is a breathtaking achievement: a surprisingly emotional narrative about the persistence of life, the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, and the scope of deep time, all of which have something to tell us about our current crisis.

Editorial Reviews

MARCH 2022 - AudioFile

With a velvety British voice, Adetomiwa Edun describes ecosystems as they may have been hundreds of millions of years ago. Listeners have the chance to get up close and personal with the Terrible Moon-Rat, the Akokan knobblehead, and other prehistoric animals and plants and learn how they may have interacted with their environments. Edun glides smoothly over the many scientific names and terms, never letting them disrupt the evocative pictures paleobiologist Halliday paints of ancient swamps, oceans, and grassy plains and their denizens. The final chapter addresses the climate changes we’re facing now and how knowledge of the planet’s past shifts between greenhouse world and “icehouse” world inform our situation today, and our future. J.M.D. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

A poet among paleontologists . . . Think of a series of immense and immersive museum dioramas, with no glass separating you from the action. . . . The narrative becomes shockingly real and immediate, as individual dramas and entire, vibrant panoramas unfold in what feels like real time.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Written with gusto and bravado . . . 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.”—Steve Brusatte, Scientific American

“Halliday’s brilliantly imaginative reconstructions, his deft marshalling of complex science, offers a thrilling experience of deep-time nature for pop-science buffs.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Halliday takes an energizing spin through Earth’s past in his magnificent debut. . . . This show-stopping work deserves wide readership.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Otherlands is one of those rare books that are both deeply informative and daringly imaginative. It will change the way you look at the history of life, and perhaps also its future.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“Kaleidoscopic and evocative . . . [Halliday] takes quiet fossil records and complex scientific research and brings them alive—Maybe most important, Otherlands is a timely reminder of our planet’s impermanence and what we can learn from the past.”—Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature

“A book of almost unimaginable riches . . . This is an utterly serious piece of work, meticulously evidence-based and epically cinematic. Or rather, beyond cinematic. The writing is so palpably alive.”—The Sunday Times (U.K.)
 
“A fascinating journey through Earth’s history . . . 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.”—New Scientist

“Vivid . . . An intricate analysis of our planet's interconnected past, it is impossible to come away from Otherlands without awe for what may lie ahead.”—Independent

“The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read.”—Tom Holland, author of Dominion

“Deep time is very hard to capture—even to imagine—and yet Thomas Halliday has done so in this 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, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

“Absolutely gripping . . . Earth has been many different worlds over its planetary history, and Thomas Halliday is the perfect tour guide to these past landscapes and the extraordinary creatures that inhabited them.”—Lewis Dartnell, author of Origins: How the Earth’s History Shaped Human History

MARCH 2022 - AudioFile

With a velvety British voice, Adetomiwa Edun describes ecosystems as they may have been hundreds of millions of years ago. Listeners have the chance to get up close and personal with the Terrible Moon-Rat, the Akokan knobblehead, and other prehistoric animals and plants and learn how they may have interacted with their environments. Edun glides smoothly over the many scientific names and terms, never letting them disrupt the evocative pictures paleobiologist Halliday paints of ancient swamps, oceans, and grassy plains and their denizens. The final chapter addresses the climate changes we’re facing now and how knowledge of the planet’s past shifts between greenhouse world and “icehouse” world inform our situation today, and our future. J.M.D. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2022-01-11
A tour of the past worlds that the geological history of Earth reveals.

British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Halliday roams the globe to examine the geological maxim that Earth’s past is its present and future—that the processes that once placed the continents into a single supermass will do so again. He begins along the banks of the Thames, which “now enters the sea more than 100 miles south of where it used to flow” thanks to changing sea levels in times of glaciation and glacial melt: Britain was once a tropical swamp. The author recognizes that geologic time is mind-boggling given a record of life that stretches back 4 billion years and a planet another half-billion years older than that. He takes pains, therefore, to write with clarity about what is “directly observable from the fossil record,” allowing for a few alternate theories and surprises. One of the latter is his observation that grasses are only 70 million years old, meaning that grassland animals are younger than that. He chronicles his travels to oddball geological places such as Italy’s Gargano Peninsula, which really belongs out in the middle of the ocean and which was populated “over the water, with ancestrally small animals—mice and dormice, for example, blown across on bits of floating plant, and birds flying over.” The monkeys that made their ways from Africa to South America had a tougher journey, crossing more than 1,000 miles of sea long after the continents broke apart 140 million years ago. Halliday brings good news: After periods of mass extinction come mass flourishing: “A new age begins, with new gods, and new worlds. After death, life; after extinction, speciation.” The bad news: Humans are likely toast all the same.

A bracing pleasure for Earth-science buffs and readers interested in diving into deep history.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176163070
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

The House of Millions of Years


‘Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within’

—Oodgeroo Noonuccal, The Past


‘What tempest blows me into that deep ocean of ages past, I do not know’

—Ole Worm


I am looking out of the window, across farmland, houses, and parks, towards a place that for hundreds of years has been known as World’s End. It has this name because of its past remoteness from London, a city that has now grown to absorb it. But not too long ago this really was the end of the world. The soil here was laid down in the last ice age, a gravelly mixture deposited by rivers that once flowed into the Thames. As the glaciers advanced, they diverted its course, and the Thames now enters the sea more than 100 miles south of where it used to flow. From the ridged hills, clay crumpled by the weight of ice, it is possible, just about, to mentally strip away the hedgerows, the gardens, the streetlamps, and imagine another land, a cold world on the edge of an ice sheet extending hundreds of miles away. Below the icy gravel lies the London Clay, in which even older residents of this land are preserved – crocodiles, sea turtles, and early relatives of horses. The landscape in which they lived was filled with forests of mangrove palm and pawpaw, and waters rich in seagrass and giant lily pads, a warm, tropical paradise.

The worlds of the past can sometimes seem unimaginably distant. The geological history of the Earth stretches back about 4.5 billion years. Life has existed on this planet for about four billion years, and life larger than single-celled organisms for perhaps two 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. The Scottish geologist and writer Hugh Miller, musing on the length of geological time, said that all the years of human history ‘do not extend into the yesterday of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond’. That yesterday is certainly long. If all 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history were to be condensed into a single day and played out, more than three million years of footage would go by every second. We would see ecosystems rapidly rise and fall as the species that constitute their living parts appear and become extinct. We would see continents drift, climatic conditions change in a blink, and sudden, dramatic events overturn long-lived communities with devastating consequences. The mass extinction event that extinguished pterosaurs, plesiosaurs and all non-bird dinosaurs would occur 21 seconds before the end. Written human history would begin in the last two thousandths of a second.

At the beginning of the last thousandth of a second of that condensed past, a mortuary temple complex was built in Egypt, near the modern-day city of Luxor, the burial place of the pharaoh Ramesses II. Looking back to the building of the Ramesseum is a mere glance over the dizzying precipice of deep geological time, and yet that building is well known as a proverbial reminder of impermanence. The Ramesseum is the site that inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’, which contrasts the bombastic words of an all-powerful pharaoh with a landscape of what was, when the poem was written, nothing but sand.

When I first read that poem, I had no knowledge of what it was about, and mistakenly assumed Ozymandias to be the name of some dinosaur. The name was long and unusual, and it was hard to figure out a pronunciation. The descriptive language used in the poem was that of tyranny and power, of stone, and of kings. The pattern, in short, fitted that of my childhood illustrated books about prehistoric life. At ‘I met a traveller from an antique land who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert ’, I thought of a plaster jacket being applied to the remains of some terrible beast from prehistory. A true tyrant lizard king, perhaps, now broken into bones and fragments of bones in the badlands of North America.

Not all that is broken is lost. The lines ‘on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains.’ might be seen as time having the last laugh over a self-important ruler, but the world of that pharaoh has been remembered. The statue is evidence of its existence; the content of the words, the details of its style, clues to its context. Read like this, ‘Ozymandias’ gives us a way to think about fossilized organisms and the environments in which they lived. Take out the hubris, and the poem can be read as being about finding the reality of the past from the remnants that survive to the present. Even a fragment can tell a story in itself, a piece of evidence for something beyond the lone and level sands, for something else that used to be here. For a world that no longer exists but is still discernible, hinted at by what lies among the rocks.

The Ramesseum itself was originally known by a name that translates as ‘The House of Millions of Years’, an epithet that could easily be appropriated for the Earth. Our planet’s past also 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 each chapter, guided by the fossil record, we will visit a site from the geological past to observe the plants and animals, immerse ourselves in the landscape, and learn what we can about our own world from these extinct ecosystems. By visiting extinct sites with the mindset of a traveller, a safari-goer, I hope to bridge the distance from the past to the present. When a landscape is made visible, made present, it is easier to get a sense of the often-familiar ways that organisms live, compete, mate, eat and die there.

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