The Triassic gliding reptile Sharovipteryx mirabilis (225 mya) is imagined looking rather inelegant once landed “ with its membrane retracting and limbs thrown all directions like a collapsing deckchair” (p. There are the obvious imaginative metaphors to describe animals.
“A recurrent theme in this book is that of impermanence: “ gatherings of species in time and space may give the illusion of stability, but these communities can only last as long as the conditions that help to create them persist“” (This might not be a coincidence, she is prominently acknowledged for inspiring him to participate in the above-mentioned competition.) Let me back up my enthusiasm with some quotes that can only touch on a fraction of what is on offer. I do not know what they feed Scottish palaeontologists, but I was reminded of Elsa Panciroli’s Beasts Before Us. Reading Otherlands, it is easy to see why. Marsden Medal from the Linnean Society for the best doctoral thesis in biology in 2016. He won the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018 and the John C. It is a stylistic choice that I can get behind given the quality of the writing that follows.īecause make no mistake, Halliday knows how to craft captivating prose. Where competing hypotheses exist he picks one and runs with it, rather than detailing the academic debates and different schools of thought. What that means is that, though everything is grounded in fact, Halliday does not get lost in the details*. Stylistically, Otherlands is a narrative non-fiction book. Far more interesting are the little-known eras and places such as the Italian promontory of Gargano during the Miocene Messinian Salinity Crisis (5.3 mya), the sweltering warmth of Seymour Island in Antarctica during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (41 mya), or the underwater life around the Silurian Yaman-Kasy vent in Russia (435 mya). Halliday includes well-known sites such as end-Cretaceous Hell Creek (66 million years ago, or mya) and the Carboniferous world of Mazon Creek (309 mya) or Lagerstätten (sites of exceptional fossil preservation) such as the Cambrian Chengjiang biota in China (520 mya) and the Australian Ediacara Hills during the Ediacaran (550 mya). The 16 chapters in Otherlands, each accompanied by a gorgeous illustration from Beth Zaiken, step back in time by millions or even tens of millions of years to visit a place on Earth and describe its ecosystems and organisms. Otherlands: A World in the Making, written by Thomas Halliday, published in Europe by Allen Lane in February 2022 (hardback, 385 pages)
0 kommentar(er)
