You sense fear in a band of human ancestors as they clamber up a tree, fleeing a python. You feel like you are there on the Mammoth Steppe, some 20,000 years ago, as frigid winds blow off the glacial front. Soon enough, you find yourself underwater 550 million years ago, in what is now Australia, where fish and whales and corals are nothing but a future fantasy, as blobs of primitive cells leave ghostly impressions on the seafloor. As you read along, Earth gets weirder and weirder, the creatures more alien, more removed from the norms and comforts of today. He structures the narrative through an ecological lens: Each major division of geologic time is given a single chapter, which is focused on a single lost ecosystem. Otherlands is a Benjamin Button tale, which begins in the present day and runs in reverse, the evolution of life in rewind. In a genre that can tend toward cookie-cutter sameness ( another dinosaur encyclopedia?), Halliday has honed a unique voice. Writing with gusto and bravado, Halliday is part of our generation of 30-something paleontologists, not long out of grad school, putting a millennial spin on popular science writing. A quarter of a century later Fortey’s Life has a worthy successor in Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands. (Fellow of the Royal Society) trailing his name. It was hard science, but it read like a novel, and it made the murky depths of prehistory into a riotous story.įortey wrote from his perch at the Natural History Museum in London, as one of the world’s most respected and experienced paleontologists, the letters F.R.S.

Then, a book made it click: this was Richard Fortey’s 1997 Life, which I devoured around the time I started studying geology in college. The time spans seem inconceivable, yesterday’s worlds far too distant from our own. rex stalked its prey, every trilobite that ever fossilized was already in the ground. I couldn’t make sense of what John McPhee, in that most glorious line of geopoetry, called “deep time.” Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life has been around for about 90 percent of it.

Otherlands: Journeys in Earth’s Extinct EcosystemsĪs a teenager, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, but I had little aptitude for what came before them. A reverse journey through geologic time shows the interconnectedness of Earth’s species

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