Otherlands - A World In The Making; With Thomas Halliday

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. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerising up-close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.

You will be immersed 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 it is today. 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 then dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description is grounded in the fossil record.

Otherlands is a remarkable imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. You will see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.

Dr Thomas Halliday
is a paleobiologist, specialising in mammal evolution and phylogenetics (the science of working out how organisms are related). He has been a researcher and a graduate student at the University of Bristol and at University College London, and as a postdoctoral researcher at University College London and the University of Birmingham. He was an Honorary Fellow at the University of Birmingham and is an Associate with the Natural History Museum. He is also an international croquet player!