Otherlands

Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds

By Thomas Halliday

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A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR And The New Yorker Best Books of 2022

From Ice Age Alaska to the birthplace of humanity,
palaeobiologist Halliday takes readers
on a dazzling tour of deep time to view
astounding ancient landscapes from all seven continents.

'A stirring, eye-opening journey into deep time,
from the Ice Age to the first appearance of microbial life
550 million years ago by a brilliant young paleobiologist'

What would it be like to visit the ancient landscapes of the past? To wander among these other lands as creatures extinct for millions of years roam?

In this mesmerizing debut, the award-winning palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a breath-taking up-close encounter with worlds that are normally unimaginably distant, journeying backwards in time from the most recent Ice Age to the dawn of complex life itself. OTHERLANDS is a naturalist's travel guide, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space, showing us the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fantastical and familiar.

The flap of wings. The colour of a shell. The lingering smell of sulphur. The brush of thick ferns, parting as a creature beats a path. The caw and bustle, the shimmer of sunlight on fur; the frolic and flight of herds, the slow smash of continents, and the strange-shaped beginnings of microbial life on Earth.

In sixteen chapters, sixteen sites across the changing world, the reader is ushered back through 500 million years: palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday uses the fossil record to bring to vivid life lost ecosystems, summoning the biology, behaviour, geology and climate of lost worlds.

Open Otherlands on any page and you'll discover the rich details of an ancient past, brought to light by science. You'll also be immersed in a lush and tangible world: hear the crash of the largest waterfall the earth has ever seen, as water spills into the once-dry Mediterranean basin; see the colonies of giant penguins on a balmy, rainforested Antarctica. Otherlands takes you from the ice age to thaw, from mammals to dinosaurs to the cone-shelled creatures of the Silurian sea, in writing that has all the drama and rhythm of the best fiction or poetry.

This is a book that takes you back.

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Praise

"LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE One of those rare books thats both deeply informative and daringly imaginative" -Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

"ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR" -The New Yorker, Prospect (UK)