Otherlands - Thomas Halliday

    2022; 305 pages.  Full Title: Otherlands – A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Paleontology; Paleobiology; Ancient History; Evolution.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Here's a brief recap of our planet’s existence, as given in the introduction of Otherlands:

 

    The geological history of the Earth stretches back about 4.5 billion years.  Life has existed on this planet for about four billion years, and life larger than single-celled organisms for perhaps two billion years.   (…)  If all 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history were to be condensed into a single day and played out, more than three million years of footage would go by every minute.  (…)  The mass extinction event that extinguished pterosaurs, plesiosaurs and all non-bird dinosaurs would occur 21 minutes before the end.  Written human history would begin in the last tenth of a second.

 

    In short, very little of Earth’s history involves us humans.  Even the dinosaurs are relatively late arrivals.  A great number of plants and animals have appeared, in the seas and on the land masses of our planet.  Most of them have since disappeared.

 

    What happened to them?  What conditions, or changes to their habitat, caused them to become extinct?  It might behoove us homo sapiens to study these past inhabitants of our world, and determine the reasons for their demise, so that we can avoid, or at least delay, our own departure.

 

What’s To Like...

    I liked the way Otherlands was structured.  After an overview introduction, Thomas Halliday works backward through time, dividing the subject matter into 16 chapters.  The first six are the relatively recent epochs (such as the Eocene) going from 12,000 years ago to 66 million.  The next ten are classified as periods (such as the Jurassic), and take the reader back to 635 million years ago.  Things close with an Epilogue which focuses on where our present world might be heading, extinction-wise.

 

    Each chapter generally starts with a description of some portion of the world during that epoch/period, then proceeds to detail some extinction event, which may be gradual or sudden.  My favorite chapters were:

    #02 (Pliocene – first humans),

    #03 (Miocene – filling the Mediterranean Sea),

    #06 (Paleocene - the Chicxulub asteroid),

    #10 (Permian – Pangaea),

    #14 (Ordovician – Gondwana)

 

    Each chapter starts off with a map of the world during that age (important, since landmasses and tectonic plates are constantly shifting) and features an awesome illustration of some animal or plant that lived during that time.  There’s a handy "Table of Eras" chart in the front; bookmark it, you’ll be referring to it a lot.  The title reference is on page xiii of the Introduction, and kudos to whoever set up the links to Notes; they worked great!

 

    I was introduced to a couple of neat acronyms along the way, including LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) and mya (million years ago).  I also learned some evolutionary tips, such as why chicken legs are dark meat but chicken breasts are white meat; and why zebras developed black and white stripes.  See the end of this review for the answer to that last one.

 

Kewlest New Word…

Regurgitalite (n.) : Fossilized vomit.

Others: Outwith (prep.); Schiltrom (n.); Catawampus (adj.); Jouking (n.); Stramash (n.); Eyot (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 580 ratings and 86 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.14/5 based on 3,495 ratings and 568 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    The hot Pangaean wind is rising, and from the top of the Earth, the Arctic is about to send down a blast unlike any other.  Siberia is about to erupt.  When it does, it will expel 4 million cubic kilometres of lava – enough to fill the modern-day Mediterranean Sea – which will flood an area the size of Australia.  That eruption will tear through recently formed coal beds, turning the Earth into a candle, and drifting coal ash and toxic metals over the land, transforming watercourses into deadly slurries.  Oxygen will boil from the oceans; bacteria will bloom and produce poisonous hydrogen sulphide.  The foul-smelling sulphides will infuse the seas and skies.  Ninety-five per cent of all species of Earth will perish in what will become known as the Great Dying.  (loc. 3071)

 

    Focusing on your hand in front of your face, you will not see in detail the pictures on the wall beyond.  However, the eyes of some trilobites, in existence by the late Cambrian, are bifocal, using a lens made of two materials with different refractive properties.  This allows them to simultaneously focus on small objects floating only a few millimetres away and far objects, theoretically at an infinite distance, without any modification, an ability that few other species have ever evolved.  (loc. 4289)

 

Kindle Details…

    Right now, Otherlands is priced at $12.99 at Amazon.  This appears to be the only e-book Thomas Halliday offers, although it is available in several different languages.

 

Even in the early days of bilaterally symmetrical animals, it’s a worm-eat-worm world.  (loc. 4204)

    Finding anything to gripe about in Otherlands is challenging.  As you’d expect from a science book, there is no cussing.  The closest we come to that is the mention of a marine worm aptly named the “penis-worm”.  Anyone who finds that offensive is overreacting.

 

    Some reviewers didn’t like the Epilogue’s message that things like global warming, deforestation, and carbon emissions could lead (or is already leading) our planet into a new Extinction phase.  They’re entitled to their opinions, but Science is on the author’s side on this issue.

 

    The Amazon page for Otherlands will tell you that the Kindle version is 409 pages long.  Don’t let that length deter you from picking up this book; the last one hundred pages are Notes and a Glossary.  The text stops at page 305.

 

    Finally, be aware that the author was born and raised in the highlands of Scotland.  So you get some “un-American” words and spellings such as encyclopaedia, outwith, plough, sough, scarper, faeces, and the indecipherable quango.  The unit of weight for 2,000 pounds is for some reason spelt two ways: tons and tonnes.  But cheer up, at least the “z” words like fertilize are spelt correctly, unlike in that crazy language the English use.

 

    But these are all petty quibbles.  I found Otherlands to be a fascinating and enlightening read.  I could see the progression (albeit, in reverse order) of life as it developed on this planet, struggled to cope with fluctuations in its habitat, and adapted-or-perished as a result.  We’ll close this review with one last bit of wisdom from the book that is applicable to another threat to our existence: overpopulation.

 

“Migration cannot save a population if there is nowhere to go.”

 

    9½ Stars.  Why do zebras have stripes, you ask?  Because the pattern prevents flying insects from being able to easily judge landing distances at close range.  So a striped zebra ends up suffering less insect bites than an unstriped one.