‘An extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth… Epically cinematic… It could well be the best I read in 2022 – and I know it’s only January.’ ― Sunday Times Halliday was in conversation with the science writer and broadcaster Gaia Vince.

Traversing different epochs and continents, we traveled from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests and penguins of Eocene Antarctica, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. Using scientific information from the fossil record, he guided us through a series of ancient landscapes, from the dawn of complex life 500 million years ago to the birthplace of humanity. Halliday drew from his new book Otherlands: A World In the Making, which has won extraordinary acclaim. In March 2022 we were joined by award-winning palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday as he took us on an exhilarating journey – not across space but into deep time to explore the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Those worlds, those other lands, can never be visited – at least not in the physical sense …The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth.’ – Thomas Halliday ‘The worlds of the past can sometimes seem unimaginably distant. ‘The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read’ – Tom Holland, author of Dominion

Otherlands by Thomas Halliday