The Sapiens for natural history: a brilliant paleo-biologist and acclaimed author recreates sixteen extinct worlds, from the emergence of early multicellular creatures 550-million years ago to the most recent Ice Age.
Taken in isolation, a fossil can be a fantastic lesson on anatomy, on shape, on form, and evolution. But, no fossil, whether animal, plant, fungus, or microbe, ever existed in isolation. Each lived within an ecosystem, an interaction among myriad species and the environment, a complex mishmash of life, weather, and chemistry, also dependent on the spin of the Earth, the position of the continents, and the minerals in the soil or the water.
Paleo-biologist Thomas Halliday has mined the most recent paleontological advances to reveal characteristics of life in the distant past and rendered them here with a novelist's eye for detail and drama. The fossil record is transformed from impressions on rocks and taxonomies into vibrant and thriving communities, the remnants of real, living organisms that showed off bright feathers or flowers, called and buzzed, courted and fell sick. Halliday resurrects a bustling scene on a 7,000km long glass reef in the Jurassic; the rapid refilling of the Mediterranean salt basin 5.3-million years ago; and scenes from the polar rainforest of Antarctica 41-million years ago.
But, the biology of the past is not just a curiosity. Ecological principles that apply to modern tropical rainforests and the lichen-world of the tundra applied to the ecosystems of the past. By bringing us up close to the intricate relationships of these ancient worlds, Halliday allows us to discover the inner workings, and the fragility, of our own. Otherlands is a naturalist's travel guide, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space, showing us the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.
