otherlands a world in the making by thomas halliday

I do not know what they feed Scottish palaeontologists, but I was reminded of Elsa Panciroli’s Beasts Before Us. Reading Otherlands, it is easy to see why. Marsden Medal from the Linnean Society for the best doctoral thesis in biology in 2016. He won the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018 and the John C.

It is a stylistic choice that I can get behind given the quality of the writing that follows.īecause make no mistake, Halliday knows how to craft captivating prose. Where competing hypotheses exist he picks one and runs with it, rather than detailing the academic debates and different schools of thought. What that means is that, though everything is grounded in fact, Halliday does not get lost in the details*. Stylistically, Otherlands is a narrative non-fiction book. Far more interesting are the little-known eras and places such as the Italian promontory of Gargano during the Miocene Messinian Salinity Crisis (5.3 mya), the sweltering warmth of Seymour Island in Antarctica during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (41 mya), or the underwater life around the Silurian Yaman-Kasy vent in Russia (435 mya). Halliday includes well-known sites such as end-Cretaceous Hell Creek (66 million years ago, or mya) and the Carboniferous world of Mazon Creek (309 mya) or Lagerstätten (sites of exceptional fossil preservation) such as the Cambrian Chengjiang biota in China (520 mya) and the Australian Ediacara Hills during the Ediacaran (550 mya). The 16 chapters in Otherlands, each accompanied by a gorgeous illustration from Beth Zaiken, step back in time by millions or even tens of millions of years to visit a place on Earth and describe its ecosystems and organisms.

Otherlands: A World in the Making, written by Thomas Halliday, published in Europe by Allen Lane in February 2022 (hardback, 385 pages)

Otherlands a world in the making by thomas halliday