thomas halliday otherlands a world in the making

It could well be the best I read in 2022 - and I know it's only January - James McConnachie * Sunday Times * A poet among palaeontologists - David P. It is a book that will make its own solid and lasting contribution. But Thomas Halliday has produced a book the like of which I have never come across - Jeremy Paxman An extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth. This is a monumental work and I suspect it will be a very important book for future generations - Ray Mears, Chair of the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing The word 'original' is really overworked. It makes you think about the past differently and it certainly makes you think about the future differently.

This book takes us through the natural history of previous forms of life in the most beguiling way. ‘As close to time travel as you are likely to get’ Bill McKibben

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. This is the past as we’ve never seen it before. A dazzlingly original, lyrical and epic encounter with the Earth as it used to be

Thomas halliday otherlands a world in the making