You can never visit the environments through which titanic dinosaurs strode, never walk on their soil nor swim in their water. The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth. [loc. 440]
Halliday's evocative, poetic journey into the past of our planet is an immensely readable survey of what's preserved in the fossil record. The journey starts in the Pleistocene (the geological period that began about two and a half million years ago, and ended around 12,000 years before the present), and moving backwards through Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene et cetera, he describes the flora, fauna, climate, geology and even astronomy of each period. The survey ends with the Ediacaran period, half a billion years ago, when life was just starting to become complex and multicellular. As well as ranging through time, Halliday examines different areas of the planet, though of course continental drift has shuffled everything around. For the Paleocene, 66 million years ago and featuring the Chixculub impact, it's Hell Creek in what is now Montana, while for the (deeply weird) Devonian it's Rhynie in now-Scotland.
Halliday rejoices in vivid images -- the varied colours of warm pools colonised by cyanobacteria, the sizzle of a melting glacier, the vast extent of the mammoth steppe which stretched from Ireland to Canada, the mile-high waterfall that filled the eastern Mediterranean -- and fascinating factoids. I have learnt that baby pterosaurs are termed 'flaplings', that horseflies evolved millions of years before horses, that the moon was much brighter (because closer) in the Ediacaran period, that some trilobites had bifocal vision, that ammonites could only hear sound for a brief period after hatching, that deers' antlers grow through a mechanism similar to cancer (and thus deer have only 20% the rate of cancer observed in other wild mammals). And -- in the final chapter, where Halliday discusses the current state of the planet and the threat of climate change -- I discovered that 'Between 1970 and 2019, the Great Plains ecosystem of North America moved north by an average distance of 365 miles – that is, on average, a metre every forty-five minutes' [loc. 4941].
Even that final chapter, titled 'A Town called Hope', isn't entirely gloomy. Halliday's sheer joy in the immense diversity of life, past and present -- and in the different geological and climatic environments which have preserved traces of that life -- illuminates every page of this book. I enjoyed this book so much that I found myself reading excerpts to friends at a birthday lunch: for instance, the quotation below. Which led me down another rabbithole...
... another of the earliest Paleocene mammals has been called Earendil undomiel. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s Arda mythology, Eärendil is the voyager, the morning star that heralds oncoming joy, a reference to an Anglo-Saxon poem which uses this image to describe John the Baptist, in Christianity the herald of Christ. By the vagaries of taxonomy, the specimen named Earendil undomiel is now considered to be a species of Mimatuta... Mimatuta itself has a Sindarin elvish etymology, meaning ‘jewel of the dawn’. [loc. 2193]
No comments:
Post a Comment