Otherlands. By Thomas Halliday. Random Home; 416 pages; $28.99. Allen Lane; £20
THE DEEP previous is a international nation; it helps to pack a guidebook. “Otherlands” is simply such a Baedeker. On this bracingly bold e book, Thomas Halliday, a palaeobiologist, rewinds the story of life on Earth—from the mammoth steppe of the final Ice Age to the daybreak of multicellular creatures over 500m years in the past.
Just like the time traveller in H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine”, readers threat chronological whiplash as chapters hopscotch deeper into the previous, skipping millennia on the flip of a web page. Like that literary odyssey, it is a journey from the acquainted to the bewilderingly unusual. At occasions in Earth’s historical past, east Africa groaned beneath ice sheets kilometres thick. Antarctica, in the meantime, was as soon as a steamy tropical jungle by means of which swaggered penguins constructed like rugby gamers. Huge reefs of glass sponges grew beneath late Jurassic seas, ghostlike thickets of translucent silicon marching for miles into the darkness.
An outlandish bestiary stalks by means of “Otherlands”, which Mr Halliday evokes with a naturalist’s eye. Early hominins, he says, scavenged at kill websites with otters the dimensions of lions—maybe the primary species pushed to extinction by the ancestors of recent people. Different animals immediate science-fiction horror. Omnidens (“all tooth”), the apex predator of the Cambrian seas, might need been dreamed up by the artist H.R. Giger. The large worm sucked prey into its digestive system previous six spirals of jagged tooth. Its closest analogy, Mr Halliday notes, is the “sarlacc” from “Star Wars”.
This deep-time perspective marginalises human beings. Maps initially of every chapter convey the globe’s mutability because the acquainted outlines of the continents warp and blur, shuttling like chequers on a board. The Ediacaran interval, as an illustration, is so distant in time that even its night time sky was completely different: “Lots of the stars we're aware of are but to be born.”
Written in lush, sometimes overripe prose, Mr Halliday’s method is immersive. He depends on “hint fossils”—in different phrases, fossil data of behaviour, relatively than organic stays, a footprint relatively than a thigh bone. On this means misplaced worlds are preserved, and “a startling wing-flap…is made stable and lasting”. Mythology and folklore protect such traces too. Maori tales commemorate New Zealand’s Haast’s eagle, a monstrous raptor with a three-metre wingspan that was able to snatching a toddler. Myths of the one-eyed Cyclops arose from the nasal openings within the skulls of dwarf elephants, which as soon as roamed the islands of the Mediterranean.
The lengthy view of “Otherlands” presents each hope and trepidation. Life is already diversifying in response to human-induced local weather change: after 200m years, glass sponge reefs have returned, thriving in oxygen-depleted seas. In 2016 a bacterium was found close to a plastic-recycling facility in Japan, “the primary recognized life type …to be totally plastivorous”. However the distant previous additionally furnishes warnings.
The worldwide warming of the Eocene interval anticipated situations which may receive by the top of this century—the Antarctic forested with temperate woodland and sea ranges rising by ten metres, swamping the houses of a billion individuals. “Change, finally, is inevitable,” Mr Halliday says. On the identical time, humankind’s future requires “sacrifice, an act of permanence”. It is not going to be low cost. ■
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