Otherlands – A World in the Making – Thomas Halliday

This is a fascinating book meticulously researched and dense with information. The fossil record is described from the earliest Palaeozoic through subsequent geological eras and describes catastrophic events, mass extinctions and subsequent speciation through to the present. The evidence is from the dead fossil record..but the author paints colorful living and animated interactions between species, ecosystems, weather and climate. Some of this I found fanciful. A chapter describing how the author arrived at these descriptions would have been interesting. The book would have benefited hugely from illustrations. Fortunately Google never failed to provide diagrams of the earth’s epochs and eras and illustrations of the many interesting plants and animals described. The last section on the impact of Homo sapiens and our impact on climate change and the 6th extinction is quite brilliant putting it in the context of other such catastrophic events in the ancient past.