A review by prahlad
Otherlands: Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday

5.0

Put a corset on a springtail, tighten up the waist, and you would have a decent impression of an ant.

I laughed out loud when I read this, and this a book that is overflowing with such lyrical prose that is both charmingly absurd and impressively informative all at once. This is rare for a serious scientific book (and this is most definitely a serious scientific book). I found it to be immensely enjoyable as a result.

The book begins with the Pleistocene epoch some 20,000 years ago, with a chapter describing the Mammoth Steppe that ran from Alaska, across Eurasia, and extended all the way to modern Spain. It ends with the Ediacaran period some 550 million years ago, when the first multicellular life appeared on earth after a long period of intense glaciation (the Snowball Earth of the Cryogenian period).

It is a marvelous journey that is made all the more interesting by the author's primary device: He describes each epoch as a living, breathing period by describing the flora and fauna in detail, as though he were describing a foreign country. Filled with beautiful creatures and wild plants, he evokes a magical realm that is both extremely real and wonderfully alien. And he does this again and again in each chapter.

What's more, he travels further back in time with each chapter. This might be a little disconcerting at first, but the device grows on you. Each chapter sets the stage for the next by describing the descendants of the animals you are about to meet. It is like meeting a charming young boy first and meeting his parents the next day. This is a truly novel way of writing a paleontology book, and I was thoroughly impressed.

A word of caution though: I found that I could not read more than one or two chapters a day. I needed the time to digest the information and eke out a little understanding before I could pick the book up again. It took me two weeks to read the book as a result, but it was totally worth it.