Tuesday 15 March 2022
LATER: This is the best science book I have ever read; I have a 20+ page document of notes on both the content and the lyrical writing. I regret that I had not systematically started keeping notes in this blog at the point we were reading this.
This morning CS and I meet to begin our discussion of the book Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday. Halliday is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who investigates long-term patterns in the fossil record; he appears to be quite young, but has already won a raft of awards for his scientific work as well as one or two awards for his writing. A riffle through the book leaves me with high expectations. I note with approval that it has about fifty pages of notes, all pointing to various scholarly articles and books. The front matter includes an abbreviated chart of geolgical eras (mostly the Phanerozoic eon, presumably indicating the time-span covered in the book); I do like it that the book works backward in time rather than oldest first.
Introduction
One thing I appreciate about the book is that its focus is on ecosystem rather than individuals. As he writes:
Taken in isolation, a fossil can be a fantastic lesson on anatomical variation, on shape and function, and on what an organism can do with simple tweaks to a general developmental toolkit. But just as the statues of antiquity stood within the context of a culture, no fossil, whether animal, plant, fungus or microbe, ever existed in isolation. Each lived within an ecosystem, an interaction among myriad species and the environment, a complex mishmash of life, weather and chemistry also dependent on the spin of the Earth, the position of the continents, the minerals in the soil or the water, and the constraints imposed by an area’s past inhabitants.
–Thomas Halliday, 2022, (Otherlands, xv)
A couple of fun facts.
- Grasses — a component of the largest ecosystems today – arose only 70 million years ago, and took 30 million years to become as dominant as they are. Grasses use C4 photosynthesis, a relatively recent innovation that while more ‘expensive’ to create, makes them more robust in the face of periods of drought.
- Another fun fact is that reefs have not always been made of corral.
“Today’s reefs may be corral, but in the past clam-like molluscs, shelly brachiopods, and even sponges have been reef-builders. Corrals only took over as the dominant reef-building organisms when the mollusc reefs succumbed to the last mass extinction. Those reef-building clams originated in the late Jurassic, taking over from the extensive sponge reefs, which had in turn filled the reef-building niche since the brachiopod reefs were entirely wiped out by the end-Permian mass extinction.”
–Thomas Halliday, 2022, (Otherlands, xv)(xix)
That’s a taste of the book. I am now in the fourth chapter, and it is proving to be a great read!