![]() ![]() ![]() Mythology and folklore preserve such traces too. In this way lost worlds are preserved, and “a startling wing-flap…is made solid and lasting”. He relies on “trace fossils”-in other words, fossil records of behaviour, rather than biological remains, a footprint rather than a thigh bone. ![]() Written in lush, occasionally overripe prose, Mr Halliday’s approach is immersive. ![]() The Ediacaran period, for instance, is so distant in time that even its night sky was different: “Many of the stars we are familiar with are yet to be born.” Maps at the start of each chapter convey the globe’s mutability as the familiar outlines of the continents warp and blur, shuttling like chequers on a board. This deep-time perspective marginalises human beings. Its closest analogy, Mr Halliday notes, is the “sarlacc” from “Star Wars”. The giant worm sucked prey into its digestive system past six spirals of jagged teeth. Omnidens (“all tooth”), the apex predator of the Cambrian seas, might have been dreamed up by the artist H.R. Other animals prompt science-fiction horror. Early hominins, he says, scavenged at kill sites with otters the size of lions-perhaps the first species driven to extinction by the ancestors of modern humans. An outlandish bestiary stalks through “Otherlands”, which Mr Halliday evokes with a naturalist’s eye. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |