Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by emjay796
Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems by Thomas Halliday
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
What an achievement!
Accessible, fascinating, and genuinely engaging, Otherlands felt like paleontology Planet Earth. A sweeping look at sixteen different ecologies (and ending in the present day), Halliday asks the reader to consider what we know of this planet's past, and what we can do to ensure its future. The details of ancient natural history will always be, to various extents, speculative, but in each chapter, Halliday weaves in mentions of why we think the ecologic system in this era and this place could have looked like this (the hundreds of thousands of preserved fly wings in the mud-turned-rock of the Moradi Formation stand out to me in particular).
Halliday was able to make me feel the same way I feel every time I look at the stars. How ridiculous and incredible to exist at all, in all the vastness of space—and, in the case of Otherlands, time. Five stars for that feeling alone.
Accessible, fascinating, and genuinely engaging, Otherlands felt like paleontology Planet Earth. A sweeping look at sixteen different ecologies (and ending in the present day), Halliday asks the reader to consider what we know of this planet's past, and what we can do to ensure its future. The details of ancient natural history will always be, to various extents, speculative, but in each chapter, Halliday weaves in mentions of why we think the ecologic system in this era and this place could have looked like this (the hundreds of thousands of preserved fly wings in the mud-turned-rock of the Moradi Formation stand out to me in particular).
Halliday was able to make me feel the same way I feel every time I look at the stars. How ridiculous and incredible to exist at all, in all the vastness of space—and, in the case of Otherlands, time. Five stars for that feeling alone.