"Thus passes the glory of the world.": 3/8: 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
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
@BatchelorshowWAR OF THE WORLDS 1906
"Thus passes the glory of the world.": 3/8: 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 I In The World. |
| 0:02.0 | I'm John Bachelorette with Thomas Halliday, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, writing |
| 0:08.0 | other other lands, a journey through Earth's extinct world, 41 million years ago. |
| 0:15.0 | It's warm. |
| 0:16.2 | It's very warm. |
| 0:17.2 | There's no ice on the planet to be found. |
| 0:20.4 | We're looking at the dawn of the recent, how to understand this. |
| 0:25.6 | Now we've paid attention to land creatures. |
| 0:29.1 | Thomas takes us to Seymour Island and gigantic penguins. |
| 0:33.5 | Where is it, Thomas? |
| 0:34.5 | Where was it then and where is it today? |
| 0:37.2 | Wow. |
| 0:38.2 | Fortunately, it hasn't actually moved all that much in the intervening millions of years. |
| 0:42.2 | Seymour Island is today a small island off the West Antarctic Peninsula. |
| 0:46.6 | So it's the site of Antarctic research bases. |
| 0:49.9 | It's that the West Antarctic Peninsula is that spitter of Antarctica which stretches |
| 0:53.5 | up towards South America. |
| 0:55.8 | At the time, it was still part of this peninsula. |
| 1:00.9 | What was different, of course, at that time, it was a little bit closer to South America. |
| 1:06.0 | The stretch of water that currently separates them, which is today known as the Drake |
| 1:09.2 | Passage, had only just opened up. |
| 1:11.7 | That was something that was going to have huge impacts on the environment, particularly |
... |
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