That there was a time -- something more than 5 million years ago (yesterday, as geological time goes) -- when the Mediterranean dried up and became, in the east, a lake. And how what is called the Zanclean flood (5.33 million years ago) opened the basin to the Atlantic Ocean, letting water in, a meter every two-and-a-half hours. The process created "the greatest waterfall ever to have graced the Earth. It [was] 1,500 metres – nearly a mile – high, one and a half times the height of the modern-day Angel Falls in Venezuela." Halliday is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. He has held research positions at University College London and the University of Birmingham, and has been part of paleontology field crews in Argentina and India. He holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Birmingham, and is a scientific associate of the Natural History Museum. His research combines theoretical and real data to investigate long-term patterns in the fossil record, particularly in mammals. He was the winner of the Linnean Society's John C. Marsden Medal in 2016 [1] and the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018. [2] One of the main messages of the book is how ecosystems are dynamic and ever-changing. There is no such thing as an ideal ecosystem that can be frozen in time. Environments change and life changes with them, as long as the change isn’t too fast. It was sudden, catastrophic change that brought about the various mass extinctions of the past, and the message of that is obvious.

This is a fantastic, unique book which I'm only not rating higher because 1) it's a very specific mood/vibe, and more importantly, 2) I have never longed for pictures more fiercely while reading a book in my life. For most people, I would have to recommend that you wait until they make this a PBS or CuriosityStream TV or streaming series. Otherlands is one of those rare books that's both deeply informative and daringly imaginative. It will change the way you look at the history of life, and perhaps also its future" Halliday indicates that humankind bears a huge responsibility in the trajectory of our contemporary climate change. Today's atmosphere has a similar composition as during the Oligocene (an epoch ranging from 34 million to 23 million years ago during the Palaeogene period shown within the table above). However, by the end of this century, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) projects that the level of CO 2 in the atmosphere could reach levels of CO 2 similar to the Eocene (the preceding epoch to the Oligocene ranging from 56 million to 34 million years ago). Temperature ranges during the Eocene were a lot higher than contemporary ones. And, the only way to reduce this prospective increase in temperature is by decreasing CO 2 emissions and flatten the upward trajectory of atmospheric CO 2 concentration.

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The world on which we live is "undoubtedly a human planet", Thomas Halliday writes in this extraordinary debut. But "it has not always been, and perhaps will not always be". Humanity has dominated the Earth for a tiny fraction of its history. And that History is vast. We tend to lump all dinosaurs, for example, into one period in the distant past. But more time passed between the last diplodocus and the first tyrannosaurus than has passed between the last tyrannosaurus and the present day. A mind-boggling fact. This is a glorious, mesmerising guide to the past 500 million years bought to life by this young palaeobiologist's rich and cinematic writing Ben Spencer, Books of the Year, Sunday Times

Palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday embraces a yet more epic timescale in Otherlands: A World in the Making, touring the many living worlds that preceded ours, from the mammoth steppe in glaciated Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica. If you have ever wondered what sound a pterosaur's wings made in flight, this is the book for you 'The best science books coming your way in 2022’, New Scientist That Africa spent time at the South Pole, the Sahara was covered by a glacier, that the northern hemisphere was almost entirely landless, that Siberia was an island, that the moon was much closer to the earth and the day significantly shorter than it is now, and that North America was mostly divided by a warm, shallow sea Stirring, surprising and beautifully written, Otherlands offers glimpses of times so different to our own they feel like parallel worlds. In its lyricism and the intimate attention it pays to nonhuman life, Thomas Halliday's book recalls Rachel Carson's Under the Sea Wind, and marks the arrival of an exciting new voice"

In one chapter, we discover that giant penguins flourished in the then-rainforests of Antarctica during the Eocene. In another, how Jurassic seas in what is now Germany contained vast tropical reefs built by glass sponges that looked like “frozen lace”, as marine pterosaurs soared in the skies overhead. We also see how, during the Devonian period, Scotland was home to metres-high fungi that would have resembled “half-melted grey snowmen”. McConnachie, James (January 30, 2022). "Otherlands by Thomas Halliday review — an extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth". The Sunday Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 2022-08-28.