The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life on the page.This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that. Sapiens for natural history: a stirring, eye-opening journey into deep time, from the Ice Age to the first appearance of microbial life 550 million years ago, by a brilliant young paleobiologist. 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: Journeys in Earth’s Extinct Ecosystems. 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. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record. 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.

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. 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. rewinds the story of life on Earthfrom the mammoth steppe of the last Ice Age to the dawn of multicellular creatures over 500 million years ago.

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.

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