Palaeontologist Thomas Halliday breaks down prehistoric films
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Published 2022-03-21
Order your copy of Otherlands here: amzn.to/36C3jtm
Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.
Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record.
Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.
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All Comments (21)
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Apologies everyone, for the film Ponyo we incorrectly listed the year of release as 2002. The correct year of release is actually 2008!
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I am LIVING for the level of enthusiasm and wonder in his eyes. So wholesome. Please bring Thomas again for more episodes.
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Note regarding Ice Age- Someone at Fox said they would withhold funding if the dodos weren't included, frustrating the creators. So, they drew them going extinct in every scene they were in because they didn't belong there in the first place. Great video! :)
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Normal People: That's a fish Paleobiologist: That's our cousin
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The carboniferous era sounds actually kind of nice. I can't even fathom a swamp without leeches, worms, mosquitoes and alligators... It would be pretty peaceful until you encounter at 3 m long centipede I guess
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There's something about a cute nerdy man talking about pre historic animals that just gets me
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Ice Age writers looking smarter than I gave them credit.
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Fun Fact: he mentions the Carboniferous period, it's called that because those trees existed before wood decaying bacteria evolved. This led to the trees trapping the carbon from the Carbon Dioxide in the ancient atmosphere instead of releasing it as the bacteria would consume the dead wood, so as the trees died and fell they'd just sit there and get buried and eventually turned into oil and coal.
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You can tell the guy loves what he’s talking about. And also that he was attempting to not just spout all the things he knew with all the technical jargon that everyday folk wouldn’t really understand.
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Palaeontologists would say "Well, not that long ago. Only about a couple of thousands of years"....
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I can tell he's holding himself back and trying to be as concise as possible, and would have expounded more if he had the time and the right platform for a lengthy discussion. He did well on explaining, I'd probably enjoy his lectures.
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This man is so wholesome and wonderful; we must keep him forever safe.
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I want to start studying paleontology once I finish my bachelors in geology and biology and now I absolutely NEED TO KNOW where he lectures because I‘m in love with the way he explains these things. Professors that are this enthusiastic about their subjects and explaining them have become a rare gift and I‘d absolutely love to be in one of his lectures.
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What I learned in this video: 1. Most dinosaurs are older than grass and flowering plants. 2. Sloths used to be terrifying but now they're pathetic. 3. All tetrapods are technically lobe-finned fish. You are a fish.
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I love this guy’s enthusiasm, he must make such an incredible lecturer!
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This man was absolutely the child who told you random dinosaur facts with no context and I'm living for it. Edit: Can we talk about how cute the way he says "Sloths" is 🥺
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He's so cute, he's so excited about it.I love hearing people talk about stuff they are passionate about!
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Somehow these animations are ten times better researched than historical films.
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Finally! A paleontologist who breaks down movies that wasn’t Jurassic Park/World.
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Ponyo is definitely in my top favorite movies just because I enjoyed it, the prehistoric creatures in the movie were really cool to me but I never knew what they were, so its nice seeing an explanation about them.
