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mark_lm 's review for:
Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems
by Thomas Halliday
The author is a paleobiologist at the University of Birmingham. This book comprises 16 chapters. Each describes a place and time based on a particular corresponding modern place with fossil findings from that time. The first chapter describes Northern Plain, Alaska in the Pleistocene epoch, 20,000 years ago, and the last chapter describes the Ediacara Hills, Australia in the Ediacaran period, 550 million years ago. What is so extraordinary, is that these descriptions include the geography, geology, plant life, animal life, earth and water chemistry, and even the appearance of the moon and stars at that time. Halliday describes the anatomy, physiology, and behavior of the organisms that we know of, and includes the fascinating details of how we know these things, and how these organisms relate to modern plants and animals. There are many books about these things, but I've never read them described all together so that a simulation of time travel is achieved. The overall effect is mind-opening and sometimes almost numinous.