A:LL OF US CREATURES IN GARDENS: 8/8: 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
⏱️ 9 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.
1890
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Bachelorette. Thomas Halliday, his book is Other Lands, |
| 0:07.4 | taking his back and back to 500 million years ago and more. We go now to the Cambrian. This is a |
| 0:15.8 | present day fossils in China. And the scene is set by Thomas' magical writing. The land was |
| 0:24.6 | desolate and dry. There was an extreme greenhouse world. And we're looking at what was happening |
| 0:31.7 | underwater in the sea and the vast sea. Thomas, you report that all modern filers were present |
| 0:39.2 | at this moment right now. So all of what we are is descended from here. Where should we look? |
| 0:46.7 | Should we look at the fish? Should we look at the sponges? The worm like worms? Where do we come from? |
| 0:54.2 | Well, during the Cambrian, this is classically sort of a Cambrian explosion where you get the first |
| 1:01.4 | representatives of all of the filers. So a phylum in a biological sense is really a group that |
| 1:07.3 | shares the same kind of body plans. So of vertebrates as a whole, there are philums. So the phylum |
| 1:13.4 | that includes fish and you and me and reptiles and birds and frogs and everything else with a backbone. |
| 1:20.6 | And so some of the earliest vertebrates are here at the time. And so you've got things like |
| 1:28.6 | hyacuric, this for example, which is this very simple fish-like vertebrate. But also |
| 1:36.0 | several sort of wormy creatures that will eventually give rise to afterbods to those insects and |
| 1:42.7 | crabs and lobsters and so on. And at Chengjiang, we do see representatives of most of the modern |
| 1:52.0 | phyla. I think I'm writing saying that there are no, there are no akinaderms, which is a group that |
| 1:58.0 | includes starfish and sea actions and so on at this place, but that's a preservation issue that sort of |
| 2:05.0 | their bodies have just simply not been preserved at Chengjiang, but are known from elsewhere |
| 2:10.5 | around in the world. So I mean, it depends really what you want to ask. |
| 2:16.1 | You know, I've got a thing for apex predators. So I'm going to go to the one for the Cambrian |
| 2:21.2 | omni dens. What was it? The apex, you report apex predator. |
| 2:25.5 | Yeah, omni dens is one of the biggest organisms around at that time. So if you imagine a six-foot |
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