Otherlands

Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist and the spectacular worlds that were here before ours. Traveling backward through time from the recent ice ages to the dawn of complex life, award-winning paleobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing, up-close encounter with ancient eras that are normally unimaginably distant. By treating these past epochs not as geological abstractions but as places to visit, the narrative immerses us in a series of vivid landscapes that feel simultaneously fabulous and familiar.

Across all seven continents, the text charts a majestic world tour of prehistoric life. Readers explore the frozen mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska, navigate the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica—complete with colonies of giant penguins—and look up at a much larger, brighter moon in Ediacaran Australia. We witness the birthplace of early humanity, hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known, and watch as life tenaciously rebuilds itself after the catastrophic asteroid impact that brought an end to the dinosaurs. Grounded meticulously in the fossil record, every description—from the precise color of an ancient beetle's shell to the distinct rhythm of pterosaurs in flight—brings these extinct ecosystems to brilliant, three-dimensional life while highlighting the startling fragility of our own changing planet.