Later in the year, Otherlands was shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize, Waterstones’ Book of The Year Award, and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award, as well as longlisted for the Ballie Gifford Prize. Within its first weeks of publication, it became a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller, described as ‘epically cinematic… a book of almost unimaginable riches’. His first book, Otherlands: A World in the Making, was published by Allen Lane in the UK, and by Penguin Canada and Random House in the USA in early 2022. His PhD on the evolution of mammals in the aftermath of the last mass extinction event won the Linnean Society Medical for the best thesis in the biological sciences in the UK.

Marsden Medal in 2016 and the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018. and across all seven continents, Halliday immerses us in sixteen lost. Thomas was the winner of the Linnean Society’s John C. In Otherlands, the multi-talented palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a. His research combines theoretical and real data to investigate long-term patterns in the fossil record, particularly in mammals. He holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Birmingham, and is a Scientific Associate of the Natural History Museum. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.Thomas Halliday is a palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, specialising in mammal evolution and phylogenetics. Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record. We visit the birthplace of humanity we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.

Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. This is the past as we've never seen it before.

Otherlands by thomas halliday