Carboniferous

I’m usually unimpressed by non-fiction historical re-enactments as seen on TV. It resembles a farce with bad acting, bad costumes, bad directing. The more ancient the history, the more I cringe. Reading it in small snippets doesn’t seem so bad – at least when I encounter it while reading science aimed at a broader audience. Hence, when I first read a review of Otherlands, I dismissed it as something that might make me cringe, especially when the review mentioned the author taking imaginative license in setting the scene. But as more gushing praise registered on my radar, I decided to give it a chance and borrowed the book from my local library. For a new book, it didn’t have a long list of people waiting on it. Not so popular, it seems. An ominous sign?

 

I need not have worried. Otherlands, written by Thomas Halliday, is mesmerizing. Halliday is a paleontologist and molecular biologist, and he has a gift for descriptive science writing. The book is subtitled “A Journey through Earth’s Extinct Worlds”. Each chapter describes a scene at a specific location during a specific period in geobiological history. It begins with the most recent Pleistocene and works its way back in time (in sixteen chapters) to the Ediacaran period. Otherlands proves that you don’t need fancy graphics and sound to imagine the past – Halliday does it engagingly with the power of written words. Creatures, plants, landscapes and even the local weather – seemingly strange and alien – come to life in each vignette.

 

My favorite chapter is #11. Titled “Fuel”, it explores a scene in what is now Mazon Creek in Illinois, U.S.A, during the Carboniferous period. Each chapter begins with a map showing the location of the continents. At this point in Earth’s history, Gondwana and Laurentia have joined en route to Pangaea, but the Tethys Ocean is still wide, half-ringed by island landmasses that will eventually form China. Unlike most of the other chapters that focus on creatures that swim, crawl, or fly, this chapter mainly focuses on plants. Normally I’d find plants more boring than animals, but Halliday easily gets me immersed in his story. Here’s how he opens the chapter.

 

“Crushing humidity and invigorating heat. An almost impenetrable mire of vegetation, sinking into still, still black waters. Proud, straight horsetails and sprays of tree ferns stand tall, clambering over one another to reach the sunlight. The air is intoxicating – the massed plant material all over the planet has pumped the atmosphere full of oxygen, with levels 50 per cent higher than in the modern day…”

 

“Standing close-knit in the peaty mire is a large patch of trees, each no more than a couple of metres from its nearest neighbours and a relatively uniform 10 metres tall. Their trunks are crocodile-green, and textured with diamonds, overlapping like scales. Because each scale is slightly offset from those above and below, together they tessellate into a helix, giving the impression of coiling staircases, leading up into the dark fuzz above…”

 

There’s much more to this description, and I encourage you to read Otherlands for yourself. The protagonist in this story is the tree Lepidodendron. Those diamond scales? They’re photosynthetic! Why do they all grow to a uniform height? Why do the nearby waters smell of rotting trunks of this tree? How did they stand so tall given that no tree had yet evolved the strong, hardy, woody bark we see today? Were you to look underground, you’d see that the roots “grow round one another, tightly interweaving with the roots of their neighbours in the incipiently peaty soil… an extensive firm base to hold all the trees in the ground.” And with that, Halliday introduces his readers to the rhizosphere, the “root-world”. If one were to fall, it could well bring down many of its neighbours in a fatal cascade. Which turns out to be an evolutionary choice – grow as one, die as one.

 

There’s also a creature profiled in this story: Tullimonstrum, or the Tully Monster. It’s a strange beast indeed. Halliday writes: “They have a segmented torpedo of a body, and at the rear, two rippling tail fins that look a little like the wings of a squid. At the front, a long, thin feature, something like the hose of a vacuum cleaner, wiggles, with a tiny, tooth-filled grabbing claw at its end. Adding further confusion, there is a solid bar running from side to side across the top of the creature, horizontal stalks on which are set bulbous organs of some kind, which are generally assumed to be its eyes… The closest superficial similarity is with a five-eyed Cambrian oddity called Opabinia, a creature not otherwise known in 250 million years…”

 

What is it? We still don’t know, or at least paleontologists don’t, even with many fossil examples. What’s particularly impressive is that it is a soft-body creature. We normally think of fossils being just bones, but there are a number of geochemical processes that allow the remains to be encased in stone. Halliday’s description of this process is more lyrical than mine. The plants, on the other hand, turn into coal in the swamp peat. The Carboniferous is so-named because of the large quantities of organic material that became black gold – the foundation of modern industry and energy-hungry human beings and their marvellous machines. Why was there so much coal from that period and no others? We don’t know either. But locations where they were found wrote the history of the industrial revolution in nineteenth century Britain, Germany, and Illinois, U.S.A.

 

The humid Carboniferous will give rise to the dry Permian, and eventually a catastrophe that was likely the largest extinction event in the history of life on Earth. But then we enter the Mesozoic Era with the eventual rise of the dinosaurs. Reading Otherlands, I couldn’t help but be caught up in the drama of evolution writ large with changes in climate and continental shift forcing the adaptation to new niches, new ecologies. And how best to satisfy the itch than playing Bios Megafauna this past weekend! (It had been a while so I had to relearn the rules.) Interestingly, the dinosaur ancestors seem to do better than the mammalian ancestors in the few games I played, but only one of those made it into the Proterozoic Era. I should play more games and start keeping statistics. I should also get back to playing Bios Genesis and see if I can evolve into Opabinia. And if you found any of today’s blog post interesting, I highly recommend reading Otherlands. Your local library might even have a copy.