Deep-space images from the Hubble telescope and now the James Webb telescope readily produce awe and wonder at the magnificence displayed in the fabric of the universe. For people of faith, it is also natural to feel in awe of the creator of such magnificence. The words awe and awesome express a gravitas within such feelings. But alas, awesome has become trendy. As the Urban Dictionary describes it, “A ‘sticking plaster’ word used by Americans to cover over the huge gaps in their vocabulary.” However, a brief visit to The Oxford English Dictionary (online of course) confirms the first definition of awesome remains “very impressive or very difficult and perhaps rather frightening.” The universe may be rightfully described as “impressive” and even “difficult” to comprehend, but what about “frightening”?
My forays into astronomy and cosmology are those of an interested amateur. My geological career focused exclusively on our home planet. However, those dramatic cosmic images got me thinking about whether and when I had experienced awe and mystery in my encounters with the earth’s past. Or more generally, can diving into earth’s “deep time” inspire moments of awe and wonder as does peering into deep space?
Much of my research involved working with worlds long past, for which preserved records are fragmentary and the landscapes both similar and different from those of our modern world. For example, my times spent reconstructing and mapping the physical geography of the Gulf of Mexico coastal plain as it would have looked 35 million years ago presented stimulating and enjoyable intellectual challenges. I readily recall moments of revelation when a new observation or an idea gleaned from the literature brought the pieces of the geological puzzle together into a coherent picture. But my remembered response was more one of joy and satisfaction in solving a problem. Familiarity with a subject seems to work against being awed by it.
As I further wandered through my geological memories, a good candidate finally emerged. My moment of awe and mystery was not a product of my own work. In late career I collaborated with a research group in South Australia. During one visit Down Under, I was invited on a field trip to the Ediacara Hills in South Australia. At one stop in our geological outing, we walked up a stoney hill to an overhanging rock ledge. There, protected from the weather (and because of its secret location, from collectors), were imprints of strange looking organisms of the Ediacaran fauna. In my first encounter with these unassuming fossils, surrounded by the equally strange and exotic Outback, I was well and truly awestruck. The faint imprints in the sandstone record some of the earliest macro-organisms to arise on earth, more than 560 million years ago. They lived, were buried, fossilized, survived more than half a billion years of geologic burial and upheaval, and finally were exposed again into a vastly different world. And I could reach out and touch them. Take that, astronomers!
It is hard to be awestruck by something that exists only in our imaginations. The intellectual knowledge, even when aided by artistic renderings found in books and museums, of life that existed a half billion years ago had not been enough. I had to experience the physical presence, if only in fossil form, of that life.
Fast forward. A few months ago, I acquired a recently published book entitled Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds. The author, Thomas Halliday, is a young paleontologist and evolutionary biologist associated with the University of Birmingham and the Natural History Museum of London. It looked like an interesting read about a familiar subject for me: origins and evolution of life on earth. About halfway through I began to realize that this author, though writing as a scientist, was presenting other worlds as I had never seen them portrayed before. And I began to feel a sense of awe and wonder emerge as I read his descriptions of times, places, and life — the Otherlands that, like Camelot, existed only in deep time.
Fast forward. A few months ago, I acquired a recently published book entitled Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds. The author, Thomas Halliday, is a young paleontologist and evolutionary biologist associated with the University of Birmingham and the Natural History Museum of London. It looked like an interesting read about a familiar subject for me: origins and evolution of life on earth. About halfway through I began to realize that this author, though writing as a scientist, was presenting other worlds as I had never seen them portrayed before. And I began to feel a sense of awe and wonder emerge as I read his descriptions of times, places, and life — the Otherlands that, like Camelot, existed only in deep time.
It’s an excellent book, written for the interested layman, but with serious and well-researched facts.
A part of its success lies in the literary skill of Halliday, an Englishman with innate ability to use our common language to blend science and descriptive imagery into stories of triumph, survival, and loss. His words take us through a succession of vignettes of sixteen Otherlands. For each, an introductory map places the continents, oceans, and location of the site to be described. A single, simple line drawing illustrates a plant or animal featured in each chapter. The images are then painted into the reader’s imagination. The inter-relationships between the organisms and each other, the organisms and their environment, and the organisms and their evolutionary history are the crux of each story.
Here lie stories to inspire awe and wonder
Halliday takes us backward in time, beginning with the geologically young world of the late Pleistocene through nearly 600,000 years into late Proterozoic. Sixteen chapters produce vignettes of the life and landscape in sixteen specific times and places. Each short chapter reflects his scientific philosophy: “The aggregation of species that produce a feeling of place also provide a sense of time. A community — the census of organisms from microbes to trees to giant herbivores — is a temporary association of living things that depends on evolutionary history, climate, geography, and chance.” Each chapter evokes a landscape and biosphere that one would see upon stepping out of H.G. Wells’ time machine, camera in hand.
Many of the locales are out of the way places both now and then. Halliday chose ecosystems and geologies that are well preserved and documented. Many are singular spots, containing neither the landscapes nor creatures commonly encountered in popular science or fiction. Each records the seasonal and daily rhythms of the place, a tiny moment in deep time with a cast of characters that together formed a rich, dynamic, interwoven ecosystem. It is here that Halliday’s presentation stands out. These Otherlands can be hauntingly familiar yet increasingly beyond our own experience. Here lie stories to inspire wonder and awe.
Six chapters descend through the Cenozoic Era, the last 65 million years of geologic time that encompassed the evolution of humans and produced the world that we inhabit. I attempt to give a flavor of the themes and ecosystems that Halliday develops in each.
1. Thaw: Northern Plain, Alaska, USA—Pleistocene. 20,000 years ago.
A short time ago. Footprints in the gypsiferous mud flats of a shallow lake shore in White Sands, New Mexico, reveal the presence of humans in North America. But the high Arctic of Alaska is part of the broad, arid, wind-scoured, highly seasonal (warm, dry summers and frigid, dark winters) steppes of Beringia. It extends from North America, along the Bering Land Bridge, and across Siberia. It is isolated from the rest of North America by barren ice fields and mountain ranges. The Alaskan plain is populated by great herds of large herbivores (bison, mammoth, horses, camels), which in turn support an array of carnivores, including the short-faced bear (four times the size of modern brown bears) and cave lion. Survival here depends on mobility. Great migrations march to the rhythm of the seasons. But within a thousand years, with the onset of melting of the global ice sheets, increasing precipitation will begin to irrigate the steppe, peat bogs will expand, and soils and waters acidify. Tangled brush will replace the open grasslands and disrupt migrations. The great herds will disappear, along with the carnivores they fed. “The mammoth steppe is an entrancing vision of life gone by … a romantic vista filled with beasts we feel we can almost understand … Somehow, because we as humans saw them, we as humans painted them, hunted them, perhaps revered them, they are a tangible link to Earth’s history, even when gone forever” (17).
2. Origins: Kanapoi, Kenya—Pliocene. 4 million years ago
As growing polar ice caps depleted atmospheric CO2 of ice-house earth, plants that use a more efficient C4 photosynthetic process, present in only about 1 percent of plants only a few million years earlier, dramatically expanded along multiple lineages (including grasses like maize, sorghums, and sugar cane, and amaranths like quinoa). As C4 plants, which today make up about 50 percent of vegetation, are nutritionally poor, herbivores had to adapt their feeding behavior. The array of large herbivores that we encounter, some familiar and many very strange in appearance, flourish across the mixed grasslands and woodlands of the Kanapoi delta. The delta plains are traversed by river channels covered by a mixed assemblage of old and new plant species, providing fodder for a diverse assemblage of grazers and browsers caught in the midst of this long-term evolutionary transition.
3. Deluge: Gargano, Italy—Miocene. 5.33 million years ago
The scene is a very isolated setting, a topographic plateau perched on the edge of an abyss — the desiccated Mediterranean basin — in the years just before breaching of the topographic ridge connecting Malta and Sicily initiated a catastrophic refilling by Atlantic waters. It is a sky-island refuge from the arid, saline flats and lakes on the Mediterranean floor thousands of feet below. We glimpse an evening in a landscape surrounded by immense, river-cut gorges, covered with sparse arid-tolerant vegetation, and inhabited by huge flocks of migratory waterfowl and songbirds. Small, mostly dwarf mammals survive in this landscape, isolated from their relatives in mainland Europe. And within years, it is an ecosystem that will be no more. The Zanclean Flood, refilling the Mediterranean, sets the stage for its integration into the newly forming Pliocene ecosystems of southern Europe and North Africa.
4. Homeland: Tinguiririca, Chile—Oligocene. 32 million years ago
This is special time for me; the Oligocene was a major focus of my studies of the Gulf of Mexico basin, with its own story of climate, geologic, and geographic evolution. In southern South America, an emerging cold and dry climate supports strongly seasonal rainfall. Grassy meadows expand; mixed, taller thickets of vegetation line the intermittent stream courses that traverse the landscape. Herds of herbivores proliferate, resembling those of the modern Serengeti in lifestyle and numbers, but smaller in stature and with many families unique to the isolated island-continent of South America. A prolonged cooling has engulfed the world, the beginning of ice-house times. These global changes are initiating a long history of adaption and migration as the hot-house world fades into the mists of deep time.
5. Cycles: Seymour Island, Antarctica—Eocene. 42 million years ago
The name Eocene literally means “dawn of the recent.” It is the time when the modern world was born. Our setting is a temperate rain forest in coastal Antarctica, where the canopy of trees and understory of shrubs extend to the landward edge of the beach. The Antarctic warmth is one consequence of hot-house earth produced by an atmosphere enriched in carbon dioxide (more than 2x present day) and methane. Our vignette displays a time that follows closely on the heels of the Eocene Thermal Maximum, a brief 200,000-year interlude of uniquely high temps, even for hot-house times. The pebbly beach is covered in seabird nests. Most are rookeries of seven species of early penguins, all large. Ibis and ancestral plovers roam the mudflats; ancestral albatross and petrel nest on the seaward facing cliffs and patrol the skies. Monitos, a small opossum occupies the trees; they will be the common ancestor of the unique Southern hemisphere marsupials of today.
Happenstance of oceanography and coastal geography causes upwelling of deep, cold ocean waters. The nutrient-rich water feeds the accompanying cornucopia of marine life, the breadbasket for this biologically rich coastline. But far away, in the interior of Antarctica, the nucleus of a great ice sheet is developing, first hint of a very different world to come.
6. Rebirth: Hell Creek, Montana, USA–Paleocene. 66 million years ago
There is something almost poetic in the name of this ecosystem. Life is tentatively reemerging from years of hell — wildfire, acid rain, cold sunless years — that followed the impact of an asteroid in Yucatan. Pioneer plants — lichens, mosses, and ferns — cover the land. Swamp cypress, a cousin of aspen and poplar, and dwarf redbuds extend from lowland marshes onto the adjacent uplands. Among mammals, the mouse sized Mesodma family dominates the ecosystem (modern names do not apply here). Only a few other large animal groups survive, but for those bony fish, reptiles, marsupials, and tiny, feathered dinosaurs it is a time of proliferation and diversification. Multiple niches were left vacant by the great die off. Also among the survivors is a family of placental members of the insectivorous eutherian group. From them will arise all the families of placental mammals that occupy our world today. That includes us. A lucky minor clan that made it through Armageddon into a promised land and there thrived. Creation has many empty stages to fill, and it will take tens of millions of years to fully develop the new cast of characters. Hell Creek is one of those stages that has preserved for us a record of the first act. For the paleontologist, the early Hell Creek fauna is filled with new mammalian species that defy classification in terms of older and later lineages.
I will stop the history here, recognizing that ten more chapters follow in the book. The last ends, fittingly from my perspective, in the Ediacaran Hills of Australia with those first marine organisms that inspired awe in that middle-aged geologist who reached out and touched them so many years ago.
But there is also more than descriptions of 16 interesting times and places. Halliday’s writing goes beyond the brief visits afforded us. In each chapter, the moment is woven into grand patterns of change, succession, and extinction recorded in the history of life on earth. They are placed in the story of earth’s evolving climates and changing configurations of continents and oceans. They are also placed in the context of earth’s great cataclysms that slowly or rapidly truncated the evolutionary successions of most plants and animals and irrevocably changed the biosphere of the planet. Here lurks the potential to experience the fear that is also noted in the Oxford definition of awesome. There have been five great extinction events since large, multicellular organisms appeared. The latest is the best known; the end of the dinosaurs (and a great many other families) caused by a large meteorite impact. It was both instantaneous and catastrophic. Other extinction events had more mundane geologic causes, writ large enough to have global consequences. But most extinctions were not global. As the stories of the northern coastal plain of Alaska and of Gargano, Italy, tell us, dramas of change, extinction, and evolution have played out on thousands of regional and local stages throughout Earth’s history.
The epilogue might well be called the author’s meditation on the possible meanings of this half-billion-year pageant of life for the unwritten future chapter, now named the Anthropocene. The history of creation by evolution is not a linear progression from simple to more complex, or local to widespread. In Halliday’s words: “A look into the paleontological past of the Earth is to see a range of possible outcomes, a truly long-term perspective. On the one hand, life has survived through Snowball Earth and poisoned skies, meteoric impacts and continental-scale volcanos, and the recent world is as diverse and as spectacular as it ever was. Life recovers, and extinction is followed by diversification. That is, in its way, a comfort, but it is not the whole story. Recovery brings radical change, and often startlingly different worlds, into being, while also taking, at a minimum, tens of thousands of years. Recovery cannot replace what has been lost” (286).
This book is secular science, but the story it tells is a story of creation that can also inspire meditations on our understanding of God as Creator. There were, metaphorically, many an exodus from a failing ecosystem to a land where growth, expansion, and evolutionary creativity emerged. There were many great catastrophes where a few lineages, animal or plant, survived in arks of refuge to repopulate the world and recreate the beauty and complexity of evolved ecosystems.
Finally, humans, homo sapiens, are descendants of a 60-million-year recovery and re-creation of the global biosphere. We are a product of evolutionary creation, unique to our knowledge, that has evolved the capacity to be aware of a relationship with our Creator. We are children of billions of creations, a new and unique chapter in a billion-year journey. In his epilogue, Halliday writes a sobering conclusion to his journey through the Otherlands. “Unlike past occasions when a single species or group of species has fundamentally altered the biosphere — the oxygenation of the oceans, the laying down of the coal swamps — our species is in an unusual position of control over the outcome. We know that change is occurring, we know that we are responsible, we know what will happen if it continues, we know that we can stop it, and we know how. The question is whether we will try” (286).
