MORE THAN SIX HUNDRED MILLION SPRINGTIMES: 1/8: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds, by Thomas Halliday.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2024
⏱️ 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
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.
1923 MASTODON
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:07.0 | It is a great joy to welcome the author Thomas Halliday, a paleontologist and an evolutionary biologist, his new book, Other Lands, |
| 0:17.1 | A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds. |
| 0:20.3 | Thomas takes us backwards in time to what we know about the beginning of life as we |
| 0:26.3 | understand it has evolved over the 500 million plus years that we've watched multicellular life congeal and cooperate. We begin, however, in something |
| 0:38.7 | where Homo sapiens is present. It's called the Pleistocene and it's a matter of going to a place we know very |
| 0:49.1 | well which is Alaska, but this is a time when the sea levels are much lower and there is a connection |
| 0:58.8 | to Siberia called Barangia. |
| 1:01.8 | Thomas, congratulations, you write beautifully. And sometimes your |
| 1:07.0 | metaphors are so convincing, I don't want to use the scientific name. So what is the mammoth step and what was happening |
| 1:16.5 | there 20,000 years ago? Good evening, Thomas. Good evening. Yes, the mammoth step was during much of the place to see the largest ecosystem on the planet. |
| 1:27.0 | So it's a grassland which is managed by big herbivores, so mammoth as the names of deaths but also things like |
| 1:34.4 | woolly rhinos and muscox and bison and and and you know relatives of some of the |
| 1:40.6 | creatures that are still around today like like Caribou and so on. |
| 1:44.9 | But it's fetched from Western Europe all the way through what is now Russia across, as you say, |
| 1:50.1 | this connection between Siberia and North America, as Buringia and then into Alaska and the Yukon. |
| 1:57.0 | And it was not a sort of wholly identical landscape across the entirety of its length. |
| 2:04.4 | Obviously you've got bits of local variation going on here and there, but broadly it's this |
| 2:08.7 | sort of dry, cold grass dominated ecosystem which is managed by these large heavy floors. |
| 2:16.8 | And yes the book is opens in a chapter set 20,000 years ago, which is during the height of the last time that we had these ice |
| 2:25.9 | seats advanced from the poles. And at a time when Alaska was unlike today and a relatively sort of arid place. |
| 2:36.4 | We're on the edge of this sand sea, a sea of sand dunes in near a place which is now called the Ick Pickpook River. |
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