Biomechanists might concentrate on the engineering of a skeleton to understand the behaviours it would have been capable of, and phylogeneticists are interested in how living things are related and changed over time, but all of it adds up into a picture of past life. I think all palaeobiologists, whatever subdiscipline they are part of, have the shared goal of understanding how life used to be. It falls somewhere between the idea of something being ‘otherworldly’, but also recalls ‘motherland’ – a safe, familiar home. The word ‘otherlands’ came about in trying to come up with a title that reflected some level of familiarity and strangeness. Thomas Halliday has kindly taken the time to answer a few questions for us below.Ĭould you begin by explaining what you mean by ‘otherlands’? How did your fascination with these ‘otherlands’ begin and what drew you to write about this? Each chapter is an immersive voyage into a series of ancient landscapes, throwing up mysterious creatures and the unusual landscapes they inhabit. Palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday takes readers on an exhilarating journey into deep time, interweaving science and creative writing to bring to life the unimaginably distant worlds of Earth’s past. Otherlands is the exquisite portrayal of the last 500 million years of life on Earth.
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