"Thus passes the glory of the world.": 1/8: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds, by Thomas Halliday.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 July 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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WAR OF THE WORLDS 1906
"Thus passes the glory of the world.": 1/8: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds, by Thomas Halliday.
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
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. |
| 0:05.0 | Here's John Batchler. |
| 0:07.0 | It is a great joy to welcome the author Thomas Halliday, a paleontologist and an evolutionary |
| 0:13.5 | biologist. |
| 0:15.0 | His new book, Other Lands, a journey through Earth's extinct worlds. |
| 0:20.6 | Thomas takes us backwards in time to what we know about the beginning of life as we understand |
| 0:27.3 | it is evolved over the 500 million plus years that we've watched multicellular life, congeal |
| 0:35.8 | and cooperate. |
| 0:37.2 | We begin, however, in something where homo sapiens is present. |
| 0:42.0 | It's called the Pleistocene, and it's a matter of going to a place we know very well, which |
| 0:52.2 | is Alaska. |
| 0:53.8 | But this is a time when the sea levels are much lower, and there is a connection to Siberia |
| 1:00.0 | called Beringia. |
| 1:02.2 | Thomas, congratulations. |
| 1:03.6 | You write beautifully. |
| 1:05.6 | And sometimes your metaphors are so convincing, I don't want to use the scientific name. |
| 1:12.5 | So what is the mammoth step? |
| 1:15.8 | And what was happening there 20,000 years ago? |
| 1:18.7 | Good evening, Thomas. |
| 1:19.7 | Good evening. |
| 1:21.4 | Yes, the mammoth step was during much of the place, the largest ecosystem on the planet. |
| 1:28.0 | It's a grassland, which is managed by big herbivores. |
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