Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas HallidayOtherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday

Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas HallidayI’m going to say something I don’t think I’ve ever said in my reviews of non-fiction works. One of the best things about Thomas Halliday’s science book Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds (2022) is the lack of science in Thomas Halliday’s science book Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds. Let me ‘splain.

What I mean by “lack of science” is a near-absence of the oft-used popular science go-tos, such as: “In fill-in-the-date, researcher X found that …” or, “A recent study published in fill-in-the-date revealed that …” Now, given that this is a popular science book, and Halliday himself is a scientist (a paleontologist), clearly there is science here. And up-to-date science as well, with a slew of citations from 2019 and 2020 and even some from 2021. But the science, like the layers of deep time Halliday gives us tours of, lies hidden, acting as a foundation, an accretion of detail that Halliday synthesizes into a wonderfully evocative picture of ancient times. Halliday is less concerned with explaining how or why (how a particular fossil formed, why a particular creature was nocturnal) and much more focused on building a portrait of a specific time and place.

Sixteen such times and places, to be precise, moving backward through the ages from Northern Plain, Alaska in the Pleistocene to Seymour Island, Antarctica in the Eocene to Moradi, Niger in the Permian and finally the Ediacara Hills, Australia 550 million years ago during the Ediacaran. It’s a relatively unusual ordering for these types of books, which typically move in chronological order from ancient to modern times. What I like about Halliday’s choice here is that it has two results: one is that it makes it more difficult to fall into the trap of seeing evolution over time as “progressing” toward a goal and secondly, and related, that it takes the focus off of that goal being us — humans, sitting pretty at the apex of all that evolving over time.

Thomas Halliday

Thomas Halliday

Somewhat similarly, besides (mostly) ignoring humans or our earliest ancestors, Halliday also broadens the focus beyond the animal world, which is, again, typically where these books cast their eye (if they bother to go beyond the ever-charismatic dinosaurs). Here, Halliday is not interested in just the neat creatures, though they’re here as well; he’s equally fascinated by the plants, the geology, the climate, the shifting oceans and continents. And that fascination is quickly shared by the reader. And so we learn about the gigantic glass sponge reefs from 200 million years ago, “the largest biological structures ever to have existed.” About the “greatest waterfall ever to have graced the Earth … nearly a mile high … raising the eastern Mediterranean by a metre every two and a half hours.” About giant penguins tall as a person, gigantic grasshoppers (well, grasshopper relatives) with a 10-inch wingspan, early root systems that create soil and draw carbon dioxide out of the air, 10-foot fungi, microbial mats, and more.

Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas HallidayEven better is that we learn about them intertwined with their environments. Because Otherlands is less a book about creatures or even plants and more a book about ecological systems, about the niches these living beings exist in, co-exist in, and how they are influenced by each other, by the rising or falling of the seas, by the shifts of tectonic plates, the changing of atmospheric makeup. I’ve never read a book that so fully recreates an entire ecology and gives as whole a sense of what life, all life, was like in particular places at particular time.

All of this is conveyed in clear, accessible prose that, at times, especially at the ends of chapters, takes poetic flight, as when he writes of how “willows write worldess calligraphy on the wind with flourished ink-brush catkins,” of “ancient limestone crags [turned] into a land of dwarves and giants,” of how “wakeful under the stars, thunderbird and lightning beast crackle over the newly frosted ground,” of “root and hypha … interlocked as dancers’ fingers.”

My sole complaint about the book is its vivid detail and poetic language cried out for much more liberal use of illustration. The drawings here are wonderful; I just wanted more. But really, that’s it as far as issues.

Otherlands is a popular science book that uses the science for greater purpose than simply recounting the science and an informative synthesis of facts woven together with threads of poetry that creates the best sense I’ve yet come across of what our world, or at last pockets of it, were like across its grand vista of time. Highly recommended.

Published in February 2022. 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.

Thomas Halliday is a palaeobiologist and evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh. 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. ‘Otherlands’ is his first book, and is a transporting and immersive exploration of past life. He also occasionally appears on TV and radio, whether as a quiz contestant, backing singer, or in a more scientific role.

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  • Bill Capossere

    BILL CAPOSSERE, who's been with us since June 2007, lives in Rochester NY, where he is an English adjunct by day and a writer by night. His essays and stories have appeared in Colorado Review, Rosebud, Alaska Quarterly, and other literary journals, along with a few anthologies, and been recognized in the "Notable Essays" section of Best American Essays. His children's work has appeared in several magazines, while his plays have been given stage readings at GEVA Theatre and Bristol Valley Playhouse. When he's not writing, reading, reviewing, or teaching, he can usually be found with his wife and son on the frisbee golf course or the ultimate frisbee field.

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