The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Analytics'. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. How to Be Animal – A New History of What it Means to Be Human.NJ McGarrigle, Irish Times Das könnte dir gefallen. In cinematic terms, this book would be a blockbuster… Riveting scientific reading a remarkable achievement of imagination grounded in fact StunningĪn impressive, tightly packed, long view of the natural world. It could well be the best I read in 2022 – and I know it’s only JanuaryĪ mesmerising journey into those vast stretches of Earth’s pre-history that lie behind us, on such a scale that you experience a kind of temporal vertigo just thinking about it… a brilliant writer, his lyrical style vividly conjuring myriad lost worlds… It’s obviously a bit of a gamble choosing one’s Book of the Year in March – but there’s a very good chance already that mine will be Otherlands. It is a book that will make its own solid and lasting contribution. 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.Īn extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth… Epically cinematic… The writing is so palpably alive. 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 mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant. 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.

This is the past as we’ve never seen it before.

Otherlands by thomas halliday