Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week we're going on a journey into deep time.

My guest is Thomas Halliday, a paleobiologist whose book new out in paperback is Otherlands, A World in the Making.

Now, Thomas, welcome.

One of the most striking and strange things about this book is that it doesn't read like a, you know, scientific history or a book about archaeology or even biology.

It reads like a travel book.

Can you tell me what made you take that approach?

I think what I wanted to do was, so one of the things that paleobiologists do constantly during their work is, I mean, essentially what we're trying to do is to reconstruct what

life was like, what living creatures were like millions of years ago and tens of millions of years ago and more.

So really, you know, when we're asking the scientific questions and putting through these, you know, computational models and statistical tests and all of the other things that every scientist does in it as part of their career, that is with the

objective of trying to understand a living system, whether that is an individual organism or

whether that's the whole ecosystem. And I think, you know, paleontology is one of those subjects

which is fairly well represented in popular writing, science writing, I think. you know, people are pretty familiar in general terms

with extinct organisms, or at least some groups of extinct organisms like dinosaurs. And so I didn't

really want to write another one where it was, you know, in 1974, so-and-so dug up these remains

and that told us this information about the past, I wanted to try and synthesize

all of the work that has been done to sort of show what we have been able to learn and the

amazing details that we are able to uncover as a result of changing technologies and advancing

knowledge from all over the world. I mean, you decide to go backwards, don't you? There's this sort of great, you know, leapfrog hops you make across just millions of years

of time.

I mean, I think we leave the earliest hominins behind after about chapter three or so.

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