Otherlands - a world in the making; with Thomas Halliday Darwin Day 2026

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 palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerising up-close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.

You will be immersed 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 it is 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 then dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description is
grounded in the fossil record.

Otherlands is a remarkable imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. You will see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.

The book Otherlands was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, and was a Sunday Times ‘Book of the Year’

"To read Otherlands is to marvel not only at these unfamiliar lands and creatures, but also that we have the science to bring them to life in such vivid detail." New Scientist

".this ...book offers a brilliant series of reconstructions of life in the deep past, richly imagined from the fine details of the fossil record.....as near to the experience of visiting these ancient worlds as you are likely to get." Artsdesk

"Epically cinematic... A book of almost unimaginable riches'" Sunday Times

A best book of the year - Sunday Times, Telegraph, Prospect, The New Yorker and BBC History

Dr Thomas Halliday
is a paleobiologist, specialising in mammal evolution and phylogenetics (the science of working out how organisms are related). He has been a researcher and a graduate student at the University of Bristol and at University College London, and as a postdoctoral researcher at University College London and the University of Birmingham. He was an Honorary Fellow at the University of Birmingham and is an Associate with the Natural History Museum. He is also an international croquet player!

Darwin Day
Darwin Day has been celebrated since the 1930's, marking the birthday (Feb 12th) of arguably the world's greatest ever scientist, Charles Darwin, the father of evolution by natural selection. Bristol Humanists has held a Darwin Day annual lecture by a noted scientist for the last 10 years. Significant previous Darwin Day lecturers have included Adam Rutherford, Angel Saini, Nichola Raihani & Anil Seth

A bookstall will be provided by our partners Heron Books. The bar/cafe of the Folk House will be open beforehand and afterwards. Doors open at 18.00pm.

Hot food is available to order in advance by emailing folkhousecafe@gmail.com, before February 13th