Otherlands: A World in the Making - A Sunday Times bestseller

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A bracing pleasure for Earth-science buffs and readers interested in diving into deep history." [5] Glaser, Joe (June 5, 2022). "Book review: 'Otherlands' ". Bowling Green Daily News . Retrieved 2022-08-28. An immersive world tour of prehistoric life [...] Halliday never loses sight of the bigger picture, nimbly marshalling a huge array of insights thrown up by recent research. Each chapter gives not only a vivid snapshot of an ecosystem in action but also insights into geology, climate science, evolution and biochemistry [...] Mind-blowing" Edited on April 10, 2022 because I had written No Pictures, but there are a few, at the start of each chapter there is one drawing.)

Un libro que no es más que un reclamo para la consciencia, para desentrañar los misterios de un ecosistema que nos rodea y lo suficientemente frágil como para depender de pocos factores, por los cuales se puede desencadenar el desastre. 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. 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. 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. This study of our prehistoric earth is "beyond cinematic", James McConnachie says. "It could well be the best book I read in 2022" The word "original" is really overworked. But Thomas Halliday has produced a book the like of which I have never come across Jeremy Paxman Our biology in the modern day, our poor colour vision, is a direct consequence of our reliance on scent, our abandonment of vision, our ancestral journey into the night.Every animal phylum that exists in modern day has its origins during the Cambrian or, in some cases, earlier. This message is, by now, one we are used to hearing. For me, the most distinctive feature of the book is the way that Halliday chooses to describe the past. He encourages us to treat his writings like “a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space”. This provides a sense of adventure and exploration where we see “short willows write wordless calligraphy in the wind” 20,000 years ago, or walk across “centuries-old mattresses of conifer needles” 41 million years ago. A stirring, eye-opening journey into deep time, from the Ice Age to the first appearance of microbial life 550 million years ago, by a brilliant young paleobiologist

Thomas Halliday's debut is a kaleidoscopic and evocative journey into deep time. He takes quiet fossil records and complex scientific research and brings them alive – riotous, full-coloured and three-dimensional. You'll find yourself next to giant two-metre penguins in a forested Antarctica 41 million years ago or hearing singing icebergs in South Africa some 444 million years ago. Maybe most importantly, Otherlands is a timely reminder of our planet's impermanence and what we can learn from the past" Writing with gusto and bravado [...] Halliday has honed a unique voice [...] 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 [...] Along the way, we learn astounding facts" The Triassic is a period of change and experimentation, a time on Earth when, to modern eyes, it would seem as if anything goes.However, if you're a superfan of learning about the history of life on our planet, this book offers a pleasingly comprehensive take unburdened by specialist jargon - and with a rare sense of poignancy.

I read Eoghan Daltun’s An Irish Atlantic Rainforest, which is absolutely fantastic, a paean to rewilding and the benefits of letting nature do what it does best. It’s an exploration of how much life there is just waiting under the soil to return. I really enjoyed Katherine Rundell’s The Golden Mole, a selection of essays about endangered species that is very evocative. I’ve just started Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees by Jared Farmer, and it’s very interesting so far. One novel I absolutely loved recently was The Binding by Bridget Collins, a fantasy book about bookbinding and magic. Prereqs to read it: he intends none other than a basic science education -- but I think you will get more from the book if you had a class in Historical Geology in college, or are well-read.The review I read was by celebrity paleontologist Steven Brusatte, https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar... That Africa spent time at the South Pole, the Sahara was covered by a glacier, that the northern hemisphere was almost entirely landless, that Siberia was an island, that the moon was much closer to the earth and the day significantly shorter than it is now, and that North America was mostly divided by a warm, shallow sea. This is an utterly serious piece of work, meticulously evidence-based and epically cinematic. Or rather, beyond cinematic. The writing is so palpably alive... A book of almost unimaginable riches James McConnachie Sunday Times I wanted to avoid writing things like, “In 1974, so-and-so did this study”, which is a useful form of science communication, but when I’m trying to evoke a place, it really takes you out of it. So there are almost no references to people at all – and that includes me or the reader. You can read it as if you’re there. It’s purely descriptive of the place. I was inspired by a lot of nature and travel writing, particularly books like John Lewis-Stempel’s Meadowland, Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry or Robert Macfarlane’s Underland – books that really give a sense of place. A sweeping, lyrical biography of Earth -- the geology, the biology, the extinctions and the ever-shifting ecology that defines our living planet Adam Rutherford, BBC Radio 4 Start the Week