I was captivated both by the premise, and the actual telling of the earth's story. Halliday takes us into each succeeding geological era by focussing on a particular part of the world that is best able to illustrate his story. He paints a picture of the its life and times, telling us about the weather and over-riding climatic conditions, the animal and plant life he observes. It's all very real. My only problem is that this book isn't lavishly illustrated - I appreciate this would have put the price up - so I resorted to reading with my phone by my side, in order to look up the creatures whom he named and described. This book is so densely packed with information that I found I had to limit myself to just a couple of chapters a day (they're fairly short - 15 pages or so) to allow my poor brain the space to absorb everything. The book is crammed with 'Ooh I didn't know that' facts which I delighted in sharing. Here's one: 'More time has passed between the lives of the last Diplodocus and the first Tyrannosaurus than passed between that of the last Tyrannosaurus and your birth' Well, who knew? ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2023/10/2023155-otherlands-thomas-halliday.html ( )

I have mixed feelings about this - there's so much to this that's fascinating but it runs up against my own personal limits of visualisation. It's a *very* visual book, each chapter focused on a single scene, describing the geography and geology of an area and the appearance and behaviour of a set of species. For me I just found it incredibly hard to picture much of what's being described. When mentioning an animal, I pretty much always instantly searched for a reconstruction - and almost always what I'd pictured from his description was significantly different. Especially the further back you go, things are so different! With the geography I was completely lost at sea and had to settle for accepting I was only getting broad impressions, even though often the descriptions were quite beautiful. It feels like a book written to be lavishly illustrated, full of diagrams. I finished it desperately wanting that book!

If you can accept that you're not going to get a perfect handle of the specifics and you'll be regularly looking up cool sounding animals and plants, there is a lot to fascinate you here. He really does show the past eras as alien worlds, more impressive than anything out of sci fi, yet still evoking a feeling of connectedness. Even in the pre cambrian, reading about weird primitive circles vaguely drifting through the microbial mat of the ocean floor, there's still a part of me that felt tender towards them, across 600 million years. The variety of animal life and the way it's distinctively connected to climate conditions is well illustrated. There's tons of fascinating details - one that struck me was logs being able to be floating ecosystems for decades in the Jurassic because there were no wood boring sea predators like shipworm to destroy them prematurely. The glass sponge reefs which covered 7000km of sea were incredible to me too - "at three times the length of the Great Barrier Reef, these silicon constructions are the largest biological structures ever to have existed" As with many books about the natural world, there's too much amazing stuff to keep in my head and due to my first point it was often a bit of a slog getting through it, but it definitely opened my eyes again to the sheer wonder of natural history and all the unbelievable, incredible things life has done.

It ends with an epilogue about climate change with a mild degree of hope but mostly urgency, obviously. It fits in given how much the book has talked about climate and geological changes (and occasionally the negative results of life finding a new resource) with their impacts on what life can actually exist - particularly notable of course things like the Permian extinction event. Near the end he quotes Ozymandias by Horace Smith:

"We wonder — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place." ( )

Full of fascinating and revelatory stories for this reader, such as:
By the Miocene, the epoch from 23 to 5 million years before the present, sloths will reach their zenith, with some ground sloths even slowly adapting to a marine lifestyle off the coast of Peru, using high nostrils, dense bones and a beaver-like tail to live somewhat like hippopotamuses, walking along the sea floor to find seaweed.
It’s just so weirdly wonderful and the book is full of these snippets, skilfully woven into the grander narrative taking us back through time in giant temporal leaps.

I read criticism for the lack of illustrations, one per chapter (each geological epoch or period), with the other named extinct animals and plants usually only described and perhaps compared to a similar modern species, but illustrations can only be an educated artistic interpretation, so this leaves visualisation to the author’s description and our imagination, which I found sufficient. For example, from the chapter about South America 32 million years ago, during the Oligocene:
A few Santiagorothia are among the mixed herd, too; they are lithe, hare-like creatures, with long bodies and limbs. They eat the low vegetation cautiously and with eyes alert, constantly on the lookout for borhyaenids: pouched predators and relatives of marsupials with hyena-like crushing jaws and grooved, ever-growing canines.
There is also one global map per chapter, and again I found this sufficient.

But the further back in time the narrative travels, the less understandable the environment becomes, despite Halliday’s brilliant descriptions of a few animals, plants and environments that can be increasingly tentatively described from the surviving fossil record. I therefore found the later chapters more difficult to grasp, as everything becomes more uncertain and more difficult to imagine.

If this subject intrigues you, I highly recommend this book. ( )

The author is a paleobiologist at the University of Birmingham. This book comprises 16 chapters. Each describes a place and time based on a particular corresponding modern place with fossil findings from that time. The first chapter describes Northern Plain, Alaska in the Pleistocene epoch, 20,000 years ago, and the last chapter describes the Ediacara Hills, Australia in the Ediacaran period, 550 million years ago. What is so extraordinary, is that these descriptions include the geography, geology, plant life, animal life, earth and water chemistry, and even the appearance of the moon and stars at that time. Halliday describes the anatomy, physiology, and behavior of the organisms that we know of, and includes the fascinating details of how we know these things, and how these organisms relate to modern plants and animals. There are many books about these things, but I've never read them described all together so that a simulation of time travel is achieved. The overall effect is mind-opening and sometimes almost numinous. ( )