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. Otherlands 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. Otherlands 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. Thousands of scientists over hundreds of years have contributed to Halliday’s reconstructions of the past based on the paleontological irony of death being the. This is the past as we've never seen it before. Thomas Halliday ventures into the vastness of this predicament in his book Otherlands: Journeys in Earth’s Extinct Ecosystems, a compendium on Earth’s sprawling origins.

A book of almost unimaginable riches' Sunday Times 'The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read' Tom Holland

Otherlands thomas halliday