Our Book of the Month for February 2022 is ‘Otherlands: A World in the Making’ by Thomas Halliday.
‘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. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerising up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.
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. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. New research has transformed paleobiology in the last decade and Halliday shows us details which the fossil record is revealing for the first time – whether the colour of a beetle’s shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air.
‘Otherlands’ is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life – yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.
Otherlands: A World in the Making by Thomas Halliday is available for £20.00. All our copies are signed by the author.
Here is Dr Thomas Halliday introducing Otherlands:
We are delighted to welcome Thomas Halliday to Stanfords to talk about his debut book Otherlands on Thursday 17th February 19:00. Get your tickets here.