‘The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read’ – Tom Holland, author of Dominion

‘The worlds of the past can sometimes seem unimaginably distant. 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

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. Halliday drew from his new book Otherlands: A World In the Making, which has won extraordinary acclaim. 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. 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.

Halliday was in conversation with the science writer and broadcaster Gaia Vince.

Praise for Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands

‘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

‘The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read’ – Tom Holland, author of Dominion

‘Full of wonder and fascination, exquisitely written, this is time travel of spectacular dimensions – a journey into our planet’s evolution and the world in which we live. A compellingly important read.’ – Isabella Tree, author of Wilding

‘Otherlands is one of those rare books that’s both deeply informative and daringly imaginative. It will change the way you look at the history of life, and perhaps also its future.’ – Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction