It has rarely been so vividly illustrated. It’s a commonplace idea since evolution became the accepted theory of how the biological world developed across our planet, or any planet. Both omissions align with Halliday’s main goal, which is to give a sense of past organisms framed in ways of living that are part of a complete ecosystem. The exposition is also mercifully light on the cliches of Attenborough-style narration, where every scene seems to be either a mating opportunity or a meal. There are passing hints of how particular fossils were formed, and why specific locations yielded a rich haul, but the details are passed by – if you wan that kind of thing you will have to follow up the extensive notes. (Feb.A brilliant series of reconstructions of life in the deep past, richly imagined from the fine details of the fossil record. The prose is stunning, and the author packs the narrative with geological, meteorological, and biological insights, turning dry history into something fascinating for instance, the glass sponge reefs of the Jurassic period are “the largest biological structures ever to have existed,” “three times the length of the Great Barrier Reef.” This show-stopping work deserves wide readership. Halliday concludes in the present, cautioning that “there is no corner of the Earth where have not touched the way of life of its inhabitants in some way” but also asserting that humanity can “find the routes that avert disaster” in the future.
Along the way, he introduces myriad strange organisms: there’s an enormous goose from Miocene-era Italy Cretaceous China’s winged reptile the squidlike Tully Monster of the Carboniferous seas and the wormy Hallucigenia found in Cambrian water. Calling this “a naturalist’s travel book,” Halliday takes readers from the dry flatlands of Pleistocene Alaska, where “short willows write wordless calligraphy on the wind with flourished ink-brush catkins,” to the Ediacaran skies, more than 500 million years ago, when even the stars were different.
Evolutionary biologist Halliday takes an energizing spin through Earth’s past in his magnificent debut.
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