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Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds Hardcover – February 1, 2022

by Thomas Halliday (Author)

4.5 701 ratings

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“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.

From the Publisher

An epic encounter with earth as it used to be;science book;books on nature;nature history;ecology

See the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of time but as a series of worlds

WARNING: California’s Proposition 65

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Written with gusto and bravado . . . In a genre that can tend toward cookie-cutter sameness . . . 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.”—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—riotous, full-colored, and three-dimensional. You’ll find yourself next to giant two-meter penguins in a forested Antarctica 41 million years ago or hearing singing icebergs in South Africa some 444 million years ago. 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 . . . [Halliday] is appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy. 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

About the Author

Thomas Halliday is a palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist. He holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Birmingham, and is a scientific associate of the Natural History Museum. His research combines theoretical and real data to investigate long-term patterns in the fossil record, particularly in mammals. Thomas was the winner of the Linnean Society's John C. Marsden Medal in 2016 and the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House (February 1, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593132882
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593132883
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.43 x 1.29 x 9.53 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #210,544 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #48 in Paleontology (Books)
- #152 in Natural History (Books)
- #267 in Ecology (Books)

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4.5 701 ratings

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Thomas Halliday

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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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Customers say

Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They appreciate the informative content and unique geological history of the earth. Readers describe the book as a fascinating journey into deep time. However, some readers feel the book needs more visuals and illustrations.

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Readability Writing style Information quality Geological history Time travel Visuals

34 customers mention "Readability"30 positive4 negative

Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They describe it as a great read that blends fiction with informative content. The writing style is described as good fiction, though some readers feel the level of detail can be overwhelming at times. Overall, customers consider the book an enjoyable and worthwhile read that provides a vivid picture of the historical events.

"This book is easily one of the finest I have ever read, as it combines paleontology with most of the Earth sciences...." Read more

"...affairs is cause to consider what we do now. I highly recommend reading this book, I think anyone who is interested in Earth history and..." Read more

"...And the writing is very good, a pleasure to read." Read more

"...A very worthwhile and quality book, and I hope the author will write another sometime down the road." Read more

32 customers mention "Writing style"26 positive6 negative

Customers find the writing style engaging and well-written. They appreciate the author's poetic style and philosophical tone. The book is readable, evocative, and informative. It conveys scientific information at times while also using a poetic style. Readers appreciate the dramatic scenarios and technical analysis.

"...The prose even has a poetic feel and often reads as philosophical — confronting Deep Time rarely evokes these qualities in scientific books of any..." Read more

"...It is readable, evocative, and informative as can be expected from a survey that crams the better part of 600 million years of history into 300 pages..." Read more

"...This is a book I'll return to more than once. And the writing is very good, a pleasure to read." Read more

"...There is lots of content in this book, and the author conveys it scientifically at times, but also poetically too...." Read more

29 customers mention "Information quality"23 positive6 negative

Customers find the book's information quality good. They appreciate the well-researched content and interesting facts. The book is described as an absorbing read for earth science enthusiasts and paleontology enthusiasts.

"...The prose even has a poetic feel and often reads as philosophical — confronting Deep Time rarely evokes these qualities in scientific books of any..." Read more

"...It is readable, evocative, and informative as can be expected from a survey that crams the better part of 600 million years of history into 300 pages..." Read more

"...As interesting and essential to know as are topics such as geological time, tectonics, oxygen level in atmosphere, ocean chemistry, etc.,..." Read more

"...There is lots of content in this book, and the author conveys it scientifically at times, but also poetically too...." Read more

22 customers mention "Geological history"22 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's geological history. It covers ecosystems and organisms of Earth's past. The writing is superb, providing a vivid account of the flora and fauna, atmospheric conditions, and paleontology. The book combines paleontology with most of the Earth sciences, creating snapshots of extinct worlds. Readers find the blend of facts and creative imagination for descriptive period vignettes amazing.

"...one of the finest I have ever read, as it combines paleontology with most of the Earth sciences...." Read more

"...It is readable, evocative, and informative as can be expected from a survey that crams the better part of 600 million years of history into 300 pages..." Read more

"The author has spun a great series of visions into a few points in our worlds past...." Read more

"Outstanding paleontology book - it literally stands out from others by describing what actually took place...." Read more

6 customers mention "Time travel"6 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the time travel in the book. They find it an engrossing journey going backwards through millennia to the very beginnings of our planet Earth. The author takes them progressively backwards through time, starting from the Ice Age and trekking. It brings the long-lost past to life.

"The author takes you progressively backwards thru time, starting from the Ice Age and trekking backwards to more than 500 million years ago...." Read more

"...about the life on earth during different periods and going backwards to the Big Bang...." Read more

"...I'm glad I did because it brings the long lost past to life...." Read more

"...of the epochs and periods, but that it does so in reverse chronology is fascinating...." Read more

13 customers mention "Visuals"5 positive8 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the visuals in the book. Some find them artful and descriptive, with excellent scene settings. Others feel it needs more illustrations, charts, and artistic depictions. There are only one illustration per chapter, and endless descriptions of landscapes and extinct animals don't engage them.

"...Otherlands does. Two minor criticisms: only one illustration each chapter. The drawings are exquisite. I wish there had been more...." Read more

"This text is a lovely and lovingly written overview exploring the major eras of Deep Time from a holistic ecosystem wide perspective...." Read more

"...But it is not an evocative re-imagining of lost landscapes, either...." Read more

"...focused on a few species and how they fit within their environment was artful and descriptive...." Read more

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David H. (Austin)
New insights and discoveries on practically every page
Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2022
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This book is easily one of the finest I have ever read, as it combines paleontology with most of the Earth sciences. The prose even has a poetic feel and often reads as philosophical — confronting Deep Time rarely evokes these qualities in scientific books of any kind. Richard Fortey’s LIFE, and John McPhee’s ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD are two other such brilliant achievements.

The author begins with the Pleistocene 22,000 years ago and work his way backwards all the way to the Ediacaran Period. Each period has its own chapter; some stress animals, or plants, insects, and microbial life. No matter the emphasis, the author limns each chapter with other flora or fauna.

Surprises (at least for me) abound. One such was that the Cambrian Anomalocarids were thought to have died out at the end of that period but I was astounded that they show up in the Silurian after the Ordovician, the period between the Cambrian and the Silurian.

One salient observation is that the author does not concentrate on ancient animals already made famous by dozens of other paleontology books: Tyrannosaurids; Gorgonopsids; Trilobites, the giant insects of the Carboniferous, etc. Instead we get such creatures like Wiwaxia and Opabinia in the Cambrian for example. I was astonished by an animal from the Carboniferous named the Tully Monster, which has baffled paleontologists for years — they just don’t know what it is, although it reminds them of the Cambrian Opabinia.

The Ediacarans from the Precambrian are wonderfully treated in the penultimate chapter of the book. They emerge as distinct animals of considerable size (compared to the minuscule Archaeans). The Ediacardan Dickinsonia and Spriggina tell us that other as yet unknown smaller progenitors gave rise to them. Which leads to the author’s observation that fossils are only a tiny representation of life throughout time.

The final chapter is a meditation on climate (and plate tectonics) change which has ruled from the formation of the Earth to the beginnings of life and will continue until the Earth’s core cools.. Climate change deniers won’t understand much of this last chapter but the author emphasizes that the current ecological crisis is in and of itself another engine of change no matter who or what causes it. The author does not preach — he just frames the current era as it is.

Highly recommended.

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Daniel C Kinicki
Great, but needs more art
Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2022
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This text is a lovely and lovingly written overview exploring the major eras of Deep Time from a holistic ecosystem wide perspective. It is readable, evocative, and informative as can be expected from a survey that crams the better part of 600 million years of history into 300 pages. The text is possibly the best such overview on the topic I've yet encountered, and I've read quite a few books on the subject.

Unfortunately, for a book that is clearly aimed at introducing the wonders of paleontology to a newcomer, the book suffers from a crippling lack of artistic depictions. Art is limited to images of the arrangement of continents at the relevant geologic eras and a single line drawing of one organism per chapter. However, the chapters regularly mention upwards of a dozen organisms or whole groups of organisms with only a modicum of description as to what these animals (and occasionally plants) might have looked like. Myself, having read extensively on paleontology, I was familiar with the relevant names and understood immediately what the focus was, but I cannot help but think someone less versed in the topic would have simply encountered a blur of strange names and organisms they struggled to imagine.

A version of this text with comprehensive paleoart would be profound, but the current lack keeps it from true greatness.

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Ron Smith
thought provoking
Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2024
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The author has spun a great series of visions into a few points in our worlds past. I have enjoyed peering through a window to see a world very different from mine but in reality, the same world. The thorough description of each vestige focused on a few species and how they fit within their environment was artful and descriptive. I researched a few as I read through each and found supportive documentation from other sources. I am not an expert but have confidence in the author’s work in this book. I cannot imagine how much work went into the stories here, believe this was a large undertaking.
In the last chapter, the author discusses the future of our world and how the present dominate species is influencing that future. I think his call to a balanced approach with emphasis on comparing past events with current affairs is cause to consider what we do now.
I highly recommend reading this book, I think anyone who is interested in Earth history and species development in environmental science will enjoy the writer’s perspective.

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java
What Actually Happened
Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2022
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Outstanding paleontology book - it literally stands out from others by describing what actually took place. As interesting and essential to know as are topics such as geological time, tectonics, oxygen level in atmosphere, ocean chemistry, etc., these categories don't actually describe what took place. Otherlands does.
Two minor criticisms: only one illustration each chapter. The drawings are exquisite. I wish there had been more. Also, thousands of references in the Notes, so many that finding desirable ones is like looking for the proverbial needle. A list of suggested reading would have helped.
The sixteen chapters can each be read independently. Otherlands can be considered a collection of related short stories, as well as an unfolding novel. This is a book I'll return to more than once. And the writing is very good, a pleasure to read.

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Alan Camelo
Chegou danificado
Reviewed in Brazil on February 5, 2025
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Bom livro, entrega ruim. Chegou danificado

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J H Roberts
A well written journey into our planet's past.
Reviewed in Canada on September 19, 2022
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Many paleontologists have written books inviting laymen or amateurs to share in their passion for this fascinating evolutionary science. The late Bjorn Kurten professor at the University of Helsinki comes to mind as does Peter Ward from the University of Washington, both gave us well written and engaging books on the evolutionary history of our planet. However, at some point in their writing they both lost a part of their audience through the use of technical terms, broad descriptions of the fauna and flora in various epochs and confusing timelines. Thomas Halliday, takes his readers by the hand on a journey, focused in each chapter, into the life of a single species at a specific moment in time and then gradually broadens our horizon to encompass the changing patterns of evolution that brought us to visit this individual in their habitat. A simply brilliant approach that engages the reader on a personal level.

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Dominika
Good
Reviewed in Poland on February 16, 2023
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Lack of illustrations.

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Amazon Customer
Very informative
Reviewed in Canada on April 15, 2023
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Good summary of life's development on Earth!

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Denis Guinefort
Great Book!
Reviewed in Canada on October 8, 2023
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I truly enjoyed the book which, accomplishes for Paleontology what Carl Sagan and presently Michio Kaku have done for other branches of science. I only wished all the described animals/plants had been accompanied by drawings.

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Top reviews from the United States

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5.0 out of 5 stars New insights and discoveries on practically every page

4.0 out of 5 stars Great, but needs more art

5.0 out of 5 stars thought provoking

5.0 out of 5 stars What Actually Happened

Top reviews from other countries

1.0 out of 5 stars Chegou danificado

5.0 out of 5 stars A well written journey into our planet's past.

4.0 out of 5 stars Good

4.0 out of 5 stars Very informative

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book!

New insights and discoveries on practically every page

Great, but needs more art

thought provoking

What Actually Happened

Chegou danificado

A well written journey into our planet's past.

Good

Very informative

Great Book!