The Read: Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I happened to see it in a bookstore. Leafing through it, I realized that it was exactly the book I was feeling a wistful desire to read when I wrote about Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, a book that described complete past ecosystems. (Something that several correspondents told me that they thought would be too difficult for any author to pull off.)
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes! So it turns out that this book is more than possible, it actually exists!
What continuing uses might I have for it?
Curiously, I feel like it might be a good book for anyone interested in writing speculative fiction—no better way to imagine a different kind of world than to read about the different worlds that have existed on this planet.
For that reason, it might also be useful to people trying to imagine the Anthropocene about a thousand years outbound from the present with some degree of factual rigor (a point that Halliday makes in the introduction and again in the conclusion). I’m almost minded to try and assign a chapter in my counterfactual history course only I think the work to make the connection might be too daunting.
Quotes
“The aggregations of species that product a feeling of place also provide a sense of time. A community—the census of organisms from microbes to trees to giant herbivores—is a temporary association of living things that depends on evolutionary history, climate, geography and chance.”
“It is possible that the loris is an outdated imitation artist, stuck in an evolutionary rut, compelled by instinct to act out an impression of something neither it nor its audience has ever seen.”
“What exists now can only ever come from what existed before. For the Triassic, what had come before had been utterly destroyed. In the face of the removal of almost everything alive, there was little to work with, and yet evolutionary forces excel at breaking contingency, finding evolutionary loopholes and working with what remains to generate new wonders of diversity.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I really like the way the book is written—it feels like a combination of accessible scientific writing, travelogue and David Attenborough narration. It’s written in the present tense in each chapter on a past environmental/ecosystem framework. There’s the occasional drop into discussing controversies and disagreements within scientific communities over how particular past ecosystems worked. Tonally, this was much more to my liking than Brusatte’s book. (The author is also charming in YouTube videos connected to the book that discuss the portrayal of past animals in Hollywood films—he’s got a future as a public scholar, without a doubt.)
What this does for me—why I was wanting it on reading many similar works of popular paleontology—is to put descriptions of particular past organisms into perspective by making them related to whole ecosystems. It’s awesome to read that there was an otter species the size of a lion, but it’s more awesome—and more intellectually generative—to understand that there was another smaller otter species at the same time, that there was a huge range of shellfish that fed both species as well as many fish species and other organisms in an environment rich in plant biomass and diversity as well, along with australopitheceans (which Halliday puts into ecological context rather than separating them out).
As a historian, I also value what this does for me intellectually in terms of providing at least some distance between “life now” and “life then”—Halliday can’t help but remind us of what distantly past life forms relate to or will lead to in order to help us understand them, but putting past life within its fuller context creates some possibility of beginning to understand ecosystems that are not just the ones we know with some substitution, where the strange (to us) anatomies and habitats make sense relationally. So “sharovipterygids” doing a bit of gliding in a distinctive, semi-isolated Triassic environment, shooting through the air with an anatomy shaped like a jet fighter, near a lake that can’t be seen from its shore because of a 6-foot high wall of plants. There’s salamander-like predator that is taking over an ecological niche from a more ancient species of chroniosuchian. And so on—I begin to understand the food webs and the relation between landscape and life somewhat on its own terms, without reflexively saying “so that’s sort of like a…”
A good while back, I talked about Julian May’s “Pliocene Earth” novels—Chapter Three of Halliday’s book is more or less the scientific reprise of that setting as May described it in the novels. What’s astonishing to imagine is that in fact there was a concrete moment in time where what had been a solid wall at Gibraltar breached, just a little bit at first, and the Atlantic began to flow in at the end of the Miocene. There are plenty of past scenes that Halliday describes that I’d like to visit in a time machine, but this would be right at the top of the list, a mile-high waterfall with water pouring in at 100 miles and hour, the sea filling in over the course of a single year.
There’s another thing I really value about the book which Halliday speaks to right from the outset, which is that this is a more hopeful way to think about the fragility and impermanence of our time on Earth, that the landscapes that are deeply meaningful to us in our fleeting lives have looked and felt so many other ways in the span of this planet’s existence. Some of the “otherworlds” that Halliday describes would not appear to us to be beautiful—some of them would be barely survivable and are hard to even imagine within the context of our world. (Something as simple as entire ecosystems without grasses, which would be just about everything before 65 million years ago or so.) I wouldn’t want to go so far as to say that we should be sanguine about climate change now by thinking that life will, uh, find a way and be something very much else in some hundreds of thousands of years. It will—but Halliday does offer some descriptions of an “otherworld” in the wake of one mass extinction and even at the abstract level of “what’s it like to be any life form in such a world” it’s hard to escape the thought that the precariousness and difficulty of existence is something to avoid even without the blessings (or curse) of sapience to ponder on it. But to be able to visualize that the landscape that you treasure today is ephemeral at both human and geological time scales is to be able to imagine that it could be different even in our own lives. For worse with climate change, but maybe for better too with changes in environmental management and in greater equity and justice in how land is inhabited and distributed.
I found myself pretty obsessed with the thought of the environments that Halliday has to describe in slightly sketchier or more speculative ways, like “Soom” at the end of the Ordovician. They’re harder to imagine, and in the case of Soom, include the mention of a large predator that we have no direct fossil evidence of, just signs of its existence. In teaching about African history, I offer hammer home the point that in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, building materials in common use in larger communities likely left few remnants for archaeologists to study, which often leads to a kind of global-scale bias in favor of historical societies that built with stone in environments and contexts that tend to preserve their structures. (e.g., even in some stone-favoring locations, most stone gets reused in later construction; the biggest or most visible sites of past habitation are often ones that were abandoned suddenly for some reason rather than the sites where people have lived fairly continuously and built over successively.) With past life and ecosystems, I get hung up all the time on the thought that there are organisms, whole ecosystems, entire periods of time, that have poor to non-existent fossil records. That thought was what fed a bit into the argument made by Gould and Eldridge that if the fossil record showed what looked like sudden jumps in speciation, maybe that wasn’t because there were just incidental gaps in gradualist evolution but the way evolution has actually worked, in “punctuated equilibria”. It’s an argument that I gather has moved on a lot over time (and has been misinterpreted and misused) but the basic thought that not all organisms form fossils well (or at all) and that a lot of fossil formation happened either because of unusual circumstances (floods, for example) or in particular environments (say, dead organisms falling into anaerobic mud and silt) sticks with me—it can’t help but make you wonder if there are “other otherworlds” in past eras that we can only vaguely guess at, organisms that were important but just never get preserved, and so on.
Tim, I suspect you might recollect this. Dougal Dixon's _After Man: A Zoology of the Future_ speculated on post-Anthropocene epochs. He reasons that human extinction would extirpate domesticated species that were unable to re-wild. Rats and rabbits proliferate and create new dominant genera. I was fourteen when it was first published, and it blew my little paleontology-enthused mind. < https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2018/07/19/book-review-after-man-a-zoology-of-the-future/ >