Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“The worlds of the past can sometimes seem unimaginably distant.”
On the timescale of life on Earth, our lifespans – even the timespan of our entire civilization from when we as a species started scribbling on cave walls – seem like those of suicidal fruit flies. Blink and we are gone, barely there on geological time scales. And yet life has persisted on our planet for an unimaginably long stretch of eternity, in the forms that to us in the here and now may seem incredibly strange and alien, lasting through horrific mass extinctions and changes and challenges in the world that seem unsurmountable (Snowball Earth, anyone?), with continents moving about and climate fluctuating wildly, and even occasional asteroids slamming into an unsuspecting dinosaur paradise.
Life persisted and adapted and overall flourished in intricate ecosystems.
One may say, life always, uh, finds a way.
Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands is a reverse journey through time and places, from a few thousand years ago backwards in time to 550 million years back, focusing on ecosystems that flourished once upon a time in several sites around the world — through these fascinating and incredibly distant in time “otherlands” that get stranger and stranger the farther back in time we go.
“Those worlds, those otherlands, cannot be visited – at least, not in a physical sense. You can never visit the environments through which titanic dinosaurs strode, never walk on their soil nor swim in their water. The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth.
This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt, or not.”
Every one of these imaginary visits to a site in the past focuses on the entire ecosystem because no organism exists in isolation from its environment. And those are truly fascinating places, with one of my favorite chapters focusing on visiting a time when Mediterranean Sea was a dried-up hellish desert of sea salt (you guys, hell exists and this is it, paleobiologically speaking) — a place that is both awesome and pants-soilingly terrifying to imagine. And if it gets too unfriendly, perhaps the depths of Silurian oceans may be fun to visit for a while. Or nice and warm Antarctica forests. Or hang out with the dinosaurs – that’s always a treat. Or go way back to the Ediacarans when nothing on Earth would looks at all familiar to us.
Life finds a way, over and over again.
“There is no such thing as a fixed ideal for an environment, no reef onto which nostalgia can anchor. The human imposition of borders on the world inevitably changes our perception of what ‘belongs’ where, but to look into deep time is to see only an ever-changing list of inhabitants of one ecosystem or another. That is not to say that native species do not exist, only that the concept of native that we so easily tie to a sense of place also applies to time.”
Halliday is great at giving us snapshots of deep time, not just a few cool animals but a good idea of what their entire ecosystem was like, painting it in the mind startlingly vividly to the point where I felt like I was actually watching the strange worlds unfold around me through a window of a time machine as the world slid further and further into the depths of time, to the time of the giant Moon in the sky looming much closer, and 22-hour days, and night sky patterns all but unrecognizable. And that’s me coming from the world where through our efforts most of the birds are chickens grown to satisfy our appetites. Future paleobiologists will have a field day trying to figure out why all the chickens took over the world.
“In the complex game that is an ecosystem, every player is connected to some, but not all, others, a web not just of food but of competition, of who lives where, of light and shade, and of internal disputes within species. Extinction bursts through that web, breaking connections and threatening its integrity. Sever one strand, and it wavers, reshapes, but survives. Tear another, and it will still hold. Over long periods, repairs are made as species adapt, and new balances are reached, new associations made. If enough strands are broken at once, the web will collapse, drifting in the breeze, and the world will have to make do with what little remains. So, after a mass extinction event, a turnover happens, with new species appearing, the web self-repairing.”
4.5 stars.
books are life 