Otherlands Quotes

“As far as extinction is concerned, the absolute climate is not to blame, nor is the direction of change. It is the rapidity of change that is important. Communities of organisms need time to adapt – if too much change is thrust upon them at once, devastation and loss is the common response. This is true of the end-Cretaceous, when the impact of an extraterrestrial rock caused near-immediate global winter, and of the end-Permian, when skyrocketing greenhouse gases from unprecedented volcanic eruptions sparked global warming.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“Traces of historical associations can long outlast actual contact. In the dense, subtropical forests from India across to the South China Sea, venomous snakes are common, and there is always an advantage in pretending to be something dangerous. The slow loris, a weird, nocturnal primate, has a number of unusual features that, taken together, seem to be mimicking spectacled cobras. They move in a sinuous, serpentine way through the branches, always smooth and slow. When threatened, they raise their arms up behind their head, shiver and hiss, their wide, round eyes closely resembling the markings on the inside of the spectacled cobra’s hood. Even more remarkably, when in this position, the loris has access to glands in its armpit which, when combined with saliva, can produce a venom capable of causing anaphylactic shock in humans. In behaviour, colour and even bite, the primate has come to resemble the snake, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Today, the ranges of the loris and cobras do not overlap, but climate reconstructions reaching back tens of thousands of years suggest that once they would have been similar. It is possible that the loris is an outdated imitation artist, stuck in an evolutionary rut, compelled by instinct to act out an impression of something neither it nor its audience has ever seen.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“To talk of the first humans is to hammer a signpost into an ancient river saying 'no humans beyond this point', no matter the ever flowing stream around it's base. There is nothing essential to humanity, no single feature that intrinsically caused one creature to be human where its parents were not... However hard you try to define every point before the signpost as non-human, and every point after the post as human, the river flows continually.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds

“There is no such thing as a fixed ideal for an environment, no reef onto which nostalgia can anchor. The human imposition of borders on the world inevitably changes our perception of what ‘belongs’ where, but to look into deep time is to see only an ever-changing list of inhabitants of one ecosystem or another. That is not to say that native species do not exist, only that the concept of native that we so easily tie to a sense of place also applies to time.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“Basilosaurids can listen to the music of the oceans, but they have not yet learned to sing.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“When we hear radical stories of long-distance dispersal, it is all too easy to place a human mindset onto the events, and it is worth spending a moment to address this. There is a temptation to describe these rodents and monkeys as hopeful adventurers, with a narrative of pioneering spirit and survival against the odds in an unknown and inhospitable land, an inappropriate framing that owes much to the era of colonialism. Where an animal or plant from one part of the world appears in another, some might use the language of invasion, of a native ecosystem despoiled and rendered lesser by newcomers. Frequently, this is an appeal to nostalgia, to the landscape known in childhood, contrasted with the altered, often depleted world of today. It brings with it an implication that what was was right and what is is wrong.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“What is native to an area and what is not is a function of the scale at which you choose to look, and tying long-extinct species or ecological concepts to present-day artifices like borders and flags is a game in which one must tread carefully.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“What is important in conserving an ecosystem is conserving the functions, the connections between organisms that form a complete, interacting whole. In reality, species do move, and the notion of ‘native’ species is inevitably arbitrary, often tied into national identity. In Britain, ‘native’ plants and animals are categorized as those that have inhabited Britain since the last ice age. In the United States, however, ‘native’ plants and animals are those that have existed there only since before Columbus landed in the Caribbean. These plants and animals have legal protection over and above ‘aliens’, but there is no easy distinction between native and non-native ranges for species, and non-native plants are not necessarily damaging to native diversity”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“But the predators of the Cretaceous were filled with no more bloodlust than a lion is today. Dangerous, certainly, but animals, not monsters.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“for example, an Italian red fox. The definitive individual of Vulpes vulpes toschii is ZFMK 66-487, housed in the Alexander König Museum in Bonn. To be considered part of this subspecies you must be close enough, in anatomy and genetic make-up, to this particular Platonic fox, an adult female collected from Monte Gargano in 1961.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“Today’s reefs may be coral, but in the past clam-like molluscs, shelly brachiopods and even sponges have been reef-builders. Corals only took over as the dominant reef-building organisms when the mollusc reefs succumbed to the last mass extinction.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“More time passed between the lives of the last Diplodocus and the first Tyrannosaurus than passed between that of the last Tyrannosaurus and your birth. Jurassic creatures like Diplodocus not only did not see grasses, but never saw a flower either; the flowering plants only diversified in the middle Cretaceous.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“Many parts of the natural world we take for granted today are relatively recent arrivals. Grasses, the main component of the largest ecosystems of the planet today, only arose at the very end of the Cretaceous, less than 70 million years ago, as rare parts of the forests of India and South America. Grass-dominated ecosystems did not emerge until about 40 million years before the present. There were never dinosaur grasslands, and, in the northern hemisphere, grass simply did not exist.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“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, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“Life evolves to fit the world in which it finds itself, but geography, of ocean currents, the position of the continents, wind patterns and atmospheric chemistry defines the parameters of that world.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds

“In its broadest sense, an ecosystem is the network of interactions between all living members of the community and the land or water that forms its environment.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds

“The only occupants of the hottest water are microbes that thrive in these sorts of extreme conditions, so-called alkalithermophiles. Many of these are sulphur bacteria which, unlike most of the rest of life, do not obtain their energy from the sun – photosynthesis stops occurring at temperatures above about 75°C – or from eating those that do, but by directly breaking down the rock itself. To buffer themselves against the alkaline conditions, they churn out protein chains, made of strings of amino acids. These acids, to some extent, neutralize the alkaline water and allow the normal chemical reactions of life to proceed. In the hotter pools, only these rock-eating cells survive, and the water is entirely clear. Not clear like a fresh river or ocean, still filled with tiny beasts that impart the slightest haze, but clear like distilled alcohol, the only clue to its presence a shimmering as the surface vibrates with bubbles. In the right light, when the sun is at the correct angle, the bare tunnel into the centre of the Earth is lit up as certainly as if it were an empty cave mouth, with only the slightest refraction to break the illusion.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“In their own sweepstake fashion, hippopotamuses will reach Malta, Sicily and Crete over the water, and become dwarfed to tiny forms. In many islands, dwarf elephants will roam. With a single, large nasal opening to support the trunk, and eye sockets not entirely surrounded by bone, their skulls will provide a mystery to early civilizations, who will imagine giant, one-eyed cyclops living in the caves of the Mediterranean.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds

“In the complex game that is an ecosystem, every player is connected to some, but not all, others, a web not just of food but of competition, of who lives where, of light and shade, and of internal disputes within species. Extinction bursts through that web, breaking connections and threatening its integrity. Sever one strand, and it wavers, reshapes, but survives. Tear another, and it will still hold. Over long periods, repairs are made as species adapt, and new balances are reached, new associations made. If enough strands are broken at once, the web will collapse, drifting in the breeze, and the world will have to make do with what little remains.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“In the complex game that is an ecosystem, every player is connected to some, but not all, others, a web not just of food but of competition, of who lives where, of light and shade, and of internal disputes within species. Extinction bursts through that web, breaking connections and threatening its integrity. Sever one strand, and it wavers, reshapes, but survives. Tear another, and it will still hold. Over long periods, repairs are made as species adapt, and new balances are reached, new associations made. If enough strands are broken at once, the web will collapse, drifting in the breeze, and the world will have to make do with what little remains. So, after a mass extinction event, a turnover happens, with new species appearing, the web self-repairing. Where”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“Constancy”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“Migration cannot save a population if there is nowhere to go. If wiped out, there is no surviving group from which to replenish the lost creatures, and so they become locally, and eventually globally, extinct. Others may persist but must reduce the area over which they roam. In Alaska, of all the species that once roamed the mammoth steppe, only the caribou, brown bear and muskox, this last solely through reintroduction, have survived.[15]”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems