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A review by adamsw216
Otherlands by Thomas Halliday
5.0
4.5 stars rounded up to 5
Otherlands is like a documentary by the BBC Natural History team, but in book form and covering hundreds of millions of years. Author and palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday takes us on a tour starting in the Oligocene and whisks us backwards in time all the way to the Precambrian. Halliday acts as our tour guide as we hover above the Earth, watching continents shift and slide backwards in time. Stopping at occasional geological periods, he brings us down to a particular piece of land or stretch of ocean where we are introduced to various creatures that lived there at that time.
Halliday explains in the beginning of the book that he wants his readers to feel the history come alive and be able to imagine what it might be like to actually stand there in the past and watch. I think he was fairly successful. He paints vivid scenes of moving landmasses, churning oceans, scurrying creatures fighting for survival, and life destroying events. Yet, he never forgets to add context, often explaining where we are geographically (i.e. "this land will eventually be a part of Australia") and how all of these strange creatures fit into our modern understanding of biology and evolution. By the end of the book, you really start to feel the weight of these geological timescales, to the point where, when Halliday mentions an 8,000 year period of human history, you realize how incredibly short that is.
My one complaint is that this book desperately needs a heavily illustrated edition. I had to stop constantly to search the internet for images of fossils and artist renditions of some of these bizarre looking animals. As vivid as his descriptions can be, they simply can't do justice to how outlandish some of these ancient creatures appear. I mean, what this book really needs is to be a BBC Natural History documentary series with one episode per geological time period. If done properly, I think it could be utterly fascinating and very approachable.
In the epilogue of this book, Halliday relates all of this to what humans have done to change the environment around them. Of course, we are in good company--other animals have been shaping the environment to suit their needs for hundreds of millions of years. Even humans themselves have been altering the world for millions of years. He asks important questions like, if we want to return to a "natural" state, what does that mean? Pre-industrial? Pre-colonial? Pre-human? Finding a balance is difficult, and there are a lot of difficult questions like this. We are undeniably causing dramatic shifts on the planet, and they are probably not positive changes for most of its current inhabitants. However, the life on Earth has survived several mass extinctions, and it is just as likely to continue on without us if we are unwilling to change.
This is a very good overview of the natural history of the Earth. Halliday writes in a descriptive manner that allows us to picture the scenes before us. There are probably way too many creatures described in this book for the average person to ever actually remember, but I think it can act as an excellent place to jump off and dig into further research.
Otherlands is like a documentary by the BBC Natural History team, but in book form and covering hundreds of millions of years. Author and palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday takes us on a tour starting in the Oligocene and whisks us backwards in time all the way to the Precambrian. Halliday acts as our tour guide as we hover above the Earth, watching continents shift and slide backwards in time. Stopping at occasional geological periods, he brings us down to a particular piece of land or stretch of ocean where we are introduced to various creatures that lived there at that time.
Halliday explains in the beginning of the book that he wants his readers to feel the history come alive and be able to imagine what it might be like to actually stand there in the past and watch. I think he was fairly successful. He paints vivid scenes of moving landmasses, churning oceans, scurrying creatures fighting for survival, and life destroying events. Yet, he never forgets to add context, often explaining where we are geographically (i.e. "this land will eventually be a part of Australia") and how all of these strange creatures fit into our modern understanding of biology and evolution. By the end of the book, you really start to feel the weight of these geological timescales, to the point where, when Halliday mentions an 8,000 year period of human history, you realize how incredibly short that is.
My one complaint is that this book desperately needs a heavily illustrated edition. I had to stop constantly to search the internet for images of fossils and artist renditions of some of these bizarre looking animals. As vivid as his descriptions can be, they simply can't do justice to how outlandish some of these ancient creatures appear. I mean, what this book really needs is to be a BBC Natural History documentary series with one episode per geological time period. If done properly, I think it could be utterly fascinating and very approachable.
In the epilogue of this book, Halliday relates all of this to what humans have done to change the environment around them. Of course, we are in good company--other animals have been shaping the environment to suit their needs for hundreds of millions of years. Even humans themselves have been altering the world for millions of years. He asks important questions like, if we want to return to a "natural" state, what does that mean? Pre-industrial? Pre-colonial? Pre-human? Finding a balance is difficult, and there are a lot of difficult questions like this. We are undeniably causing dramatic shifts on the planet, and they are probably not positive changes for most of its current inhabitants. However, the life on Earth has survived several mass extinctions, and it is just as likely to continue on without us if we are unwilling to change.
This is a very good overview of the natural history of the Earth. Halliday writes in a descriptive manner that allows us to picture the scenes before us. There are probably way too many creatures described in this book for the average person to ever actually remember, but I think it can act as an excellent place to jump off and dig into further research.