A:LL OF US CREATURES IN GARDENS: 7/8: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds, by Thomas Halliday.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Otherlands-Journey-Through-Earths-Extinct/dp/B097CL2BVX/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr1
The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life on the page.
This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt―or not. It takes us from the savannahs of Pliocene Kenya to watch a python chase a group of australopithecines into an acacia tree; to a cliff overlooking the salt pans of the empty basin of what will be the Mediterranean Sea just as water from the Miocene Atlantic Ocean spills in; into the tropical forests of Eocene Antarctica; and under the shallow pools of Ediacaran Australia, where we glimpse the first microbial life.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batsu with Thomas Halliday, paleontologist, and riding |
| 0:11.4 | wonderfully of other lands, his new book, A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds. We |
| 0:17.4 | now go to a part of the success of Agrarian life, the root system. But did I know to pay |
| 0:25.5 | attention to it until Thomas's book? No. We go to the Devonian 470 million years ago and it's |
| 0:33.5 | called the Michael Reisel. What is that Thomas? Well, Michael Reisel is composed of two parts. Michael |
| 0:40.4 | refers to fungus and the writer refers to roots and it's essentially a way in which fungi and plants |
| 0:46.3 | interact with one another to extract the maximum benefit from the soil around them, from the earth |
| 0:54.1 | and really this collaboration is crucial to the move of life on to land. I mean, we tend to think |
| 1:00.0 | what we think about life appearing on land that there's some sort of holiday pioneer that suddenly |
| 1:04.8 | emerges out of the sea and wanders up on its fins, but really that's not how life works. Life |
| 1:11.0 | thrives in collaboration and the movement of communities rather than individuals. And |
| 1:18.2 | liney in modern day Aberdeenshire or in the middle of the Caledonides mountains in the |
| 1:25.2 | Devonian is one of these places where we find evidence of these real tight interactions between |
| 1:31.5 | fungi plants and animals that really characterize the early move on to land. Without the assistance |
| 1:38.2 | of fungi plants would not have been able to develop roots and to exploit the mineral resources |
| 1:46.2 | of the rocks around them and the plants themselves being able to extract energy from light, |
| 1:51.5 | that's really handy for the fungus as well. So then you get this collaboration, but you also |
| 1:55.8 | get parasitism. We have evidence from Reini of a fungi that are invading individual plant |
| 2:00.6 | cells which are then trying to isolate those cells by hardening the surface or expanding them. |
| 2:05.7 | And we get really a very detailed and intimate look into the way that organisms have interacted |
| 2:14.3 | on land for the last 400 million years. The atmosphere was oxygen poured. Did that contribute |
| 2:19.4 | to the success of these roots and funguses working together? It's well oxygen is not really something |
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