Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant. Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours.
The eeriness of this is evoked throughout perhaps no more so than in the account of the Chicxulub meteor impact with its rain of “hot glass spherule bullets”, nitric and sulphuric showers, and “decomposers taking over”: fungi have a field day among all those cadavers.This is the past as we've never seen it before. What will be the Mediterranean in a landlocked, arid place. Although there are birds in earlier forests, there is not as yet birdsong. No diplodocus, for example, ever saw grass, let alone a flower. There is precise detail that enlivens and estranges the reader. There are two metre penguins and the surprising prevalence of sloths, now reduced somewhat in their circumstances and habitats.
On the other there is the frisson of sheer weirdness. On the one hand there is the recognisable – rivers flow, forests grow, life adapts, creatures die. It requires something of a balancing act to conjure “not an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but… a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous yet familiar”. It is a quite remarkable book, even if the dinosaurs only get a bit of a walk on part. But it is rooted firmly in the actual science – or science as it now stands, the author having won the Linnean Society Medal for the best doctorate in biological studies. To that extent it is a work of immense imagination. In part it is akin to contemporary nature writing, but the twist is none of the landscapes, fauna and flora now exist. Otherlands is an ingenious hybrid form of a book. So this new book rather whetted my interest.
Even now, at a loose end, I can while away hours poring over Zoe Lescaze’s Paleoart, a sumptuous history of how we have imagined the past. I also had the Usborne Spotter’s Guide to dinosaurs, a remarkably difficult book in which to tick off sightings. I can still call into memory the illustrations in the Ladybird Dinosaur book – the triceratops fighting the tyrannosaurus, the pterodactyl with a fish in its beak, the clutch of hatching protoceratops eggs. Like most little boys, I was obsessed with dinosaurs.
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