This was very entertaining and educational. I didn't know anything about paleobiology going into this, and honestly it was the cover that attracted me. I'm glad it did.

i’m not typically a nonfiction reader, but i found otherlands to be both accessible and highly enjoyable.

Review: https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/21620-otherlands-look-life-earth-mass-extinction-event

What was life on Earth like 550 million years ago? Until recently, it would have been nearly impossible to speculate with any accuracy on anything so distant in the past. These days, with advances in paleontology and evolutionary biology, we have a far better-informed answer to this question.

In his new book, Otherlands: A Journey through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, paleontologist Thomas Halliday offers a close-up, in-depth survey of life on our planet, long before mankind came along and started bending natural laws to its will.

Through a close study of fossil records, Halliday describes what day-to-day existence must have been like for plants and animals, beginning with the Pleistocene ice age, then moving backwards in time through different geologic epochs.

It's a colorful survey of life before the mass extinction event, based on extensive studies and the use of ever-improving technology. Halliday is careful to note that the contents of his book are “grounded in fact, either directly observable from the fossil record, strongly inferred, or, where our knowledge is incomplete, plausible based on what we can say for sure.”

Otherlands is comprised of 16 chapters, each centered on a specific locale (Africa, Alaska, Chile, Antarctica, and elsewhere) and geologic era (Pleistocene, Cenozoic, Mesozoic, etc.). The result is a deep dive into life on Earth millions of years ago, which in turn provides a deeper understanding not only of long-ago planetary conditions, but of the nature of time itself:

“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 minute. 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 minutes before the end. Written human history would begin in the last tenth of a second.”

There’s no question that Halliday, a professor at the University of Birmingham and a scientific associate of the Natural History Museum in London, is a gifted writer and someone who knows what he’s talking about.

At times, however, the author’s approach, with its full-scale descriptions of primeval flora, fauna, and environmental conditions, is thorough almost to the point of exhaustion. This approach—not less is more, but more is more—runs the perilous risk of overwhelming readers with details sometimes difficult to visualize and absorb:

“Proboscideans are certainly diverse in Kanapoi. There is not just Loxodonta adaurora, closely related to and barely distinguishable from the African elephant, but also Elephas ekorensis, a cousin of Indian elephants and mammoths. Among the trees strut stately, short-legged Anancus with their long, straight, forklift-truck tusks that almost reach the ground, and unlikely Deinotherium, whose short tusks curve backwards and are used to scrape bark from trees.”

Otherlands is a densely composed and ambitious piece of science writing. It’s also a rich, imaginative portrait of Earth’s earliest days, as expertly speculative about prehistoric times as one can imagine being within the confines of a single book.

I very much enjoyed reading this book, it was fun and informative in equal measure witch made it a easy read.

Thank you to Net Galley, Thomas Halliday, and the publisher for providing me with a free electronic copy of "Otherlands" in exchange for my honest review.

I absolutely loved this book because it really helped me to understand prehistoric ecology, evolution, and event consequences. It is utterly unlike any book I have read before in that it covered sixteen distinct ages, starting with 20,000 years ago and working backward through geology and evolution to 550 million years ago. Initially I found it awkward to begin with the most recent ecosystem and work backwards, but by the end of the book I realized what a fantastic viewpoint that presented the reader with. Since the most recent scenes are the most familiar to a modern human, the little differences from our time stand out.. This allows the reader to understand the dramatic differences between the ecosystems of millions of years ago to our current world little by little rather than exposing us to a completely unfamiliar ecosystem in which every point of interest is foreign to the reader so there is no frame on which to hang each new bit of knowledge as we learn about this unfamiliar time.

I was impressed with the author's knowledge of many different but interdependent scientific fields (zoology, ecology, geology, atmospheric science, evolution, chemistry, astroology, and many more) that enabled him to draw a vivid picture in the reader's mind of how each of these fields contributed to the life and scenery of a place and time in world prehistory. My only very minor recommendation to improve the book would be to add more pictures or drawings of the strange looking creatures that are discussed in the text, especially in the later chapters.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with and interest in the world's history prior to the current age. I'd give it more than five stars if I could!

I loved this book. While it was a bit lengthy in some places I felt that the format, A Journey Through Deep Time written as a travelogue was innovative and engaging. I felt that Mr Halliday sought to bring his reader along for the ride through 500 million years of life on this planet while making sure we felt the sights, smells and experiences of each of the highlighted eras.

I’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 is the lack of science in Thomas Halliday’s science book Otherlands. 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 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 it makes it more difficult to fall into the trap of seeing evolution over time as “progressing” toward a goal and secondly, and related, it takes the focus off of that goal being us — humans, sitting pretty at the apex of all that evolving over time.

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 book 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, draws carbon dioxide out of the air, 10-foot fungi, microbial mats, and more.

Even better is we learn about them intertwined with their environments. Because this 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.

Traveling backward in time, this book creates glimpses into worlds that existed thousands or millions of years ago. It shows us moments when dramatic change was underway—all these transition helping to create the Earth we live in today.

The order in which the story is told makes it more poignant. Instead of a triumphant march from a barren planet to the rise of humans, it creates more of a sense of how magnificent each of these worlds was in their own right. Humans were not the end game.

And yet, as the epilogue points out, we've reshaped the Earth to meet our needs. Humans are so good at exploiting resources, we've left little behind for other species. That's not something to be ashamed of—that's evolution. But if we don't become better skilled at taking care of our fragile ecosystem, we could soon reshape the Earth in ways that don't serve us. That's the ultimate message of this book. It's a warning but also an expression of hope.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

What a strange, beautiful book! I like to read about ancient, extinct worlds but this one truly stands out.

The author, a paleontologist himself, combines scientific knowledge - not only paleontology but also geology, climatology, evolutionary biology, and genetics, to name a few - with exquisite literary or even poetic style. The result is eye opening and engaging. Focusing not on single extinct species at any time but on the whole ecosystem, Tomas Hallidays offers you a glimpse into the eponymous “Otherlands”.

He also gives you a sobering perspective on our - humanity’s - problems. Climate change? There were times when lush forests lived through polar nights in the Antarctic. Mass extinction? After all, it is the sixth in a row, at least. Invasive species? Nature changes all the time and there is no such thing as permanent native ones.

Strongly recommended to fans of Richard Fortey or Steve Brusatte but I think every fan of modern, poetic nature writing will love this book.

Thanks to the publisher, Random House, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

In Otherlands, paleobiologist Thomas Halliday skips backwards through time, visiting sixteen distinct eras from Earth’s history and describing the life, climate, and geological forces at work in each. This is cutting edge science — many of the earliest species can only be inferred by the slightest of impressions they left behind; many more will never make themselves known to us — and Halliday’s prose in describing his rebuilt worlds is comprehensive, evocative, and accessible. There’s always something humbling about confronting how unimportant our own species has been in the long history of the Earth, and as we are forced to acknowledge that we are driving the latest Great Extinction Event, I suppose there’s comfort in knowing that after we are gone, the Earth will diversify and other species will fill the Homo sapien niche. A fascinating read that makes the science come alive.