A SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER<\/b> <\/p>\n
‘The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read’ Tom Holland<\/b>
‘Epically cinematic… A book of almost unimaginable riches’ Sunday Times<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
This is the past as we’ve never seen it before. <\/p>\n
Otherlands<\/i> 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. 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. <\/p>\n
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. 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. 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. <\/p>\n
Otherlands<\/i> 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. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What would it be like to visit the ancient landscapes of the past? To experience the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among these other lands, as creatures extinct for millions of years roam? In this mesmerizing debut, the award-winning palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a breath-taking up close encounter with worlds that are normally unimaginably distant. Journeying backwards in time from the most recent Ice Age to the dawn of complex life itself, and across all seven continents, Halliday immerses us in a series of extinct ecosystems, each one rendered with a novelist’s eye for detail and drama.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[98],"product_tag":[769,697,1925,121,1927],"class_list":["post-92330","product","type-product","status-publish","product_cat-nat-history-popular-science","product_tag-dinosaurs-the-prehistoric-world","product_tag-ecological-science-the-biosphere","product_tag-evolution","product_tag-natural-history","product_tag-palaeontology","pa_book_author-halliday-thomas","pa_cover-hardback","pa_dewey-560-edition23","pa_imprint-allen-lane","pa_language-english","pa_pages-8497","pa_publisher-allen-lane","pa_readership-general-trade-code-k","first","onbackorder","taxable","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"yoast_head":"\n