YouSaid · the spoken record

Thomas Halliday

lines on the record: 49
first: 2022-05-25
most recent: 2022-05-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, and you get these sort of almost sort of coded rules like yellow and black is dangerous, right? That's something which seems to have been extremely long-lived and we have some preserved coloration of wasps from the Cretaceous which show this same yellow and black coloration. So the same sort of sight that makes you suddenly recoil at a picnic is something that would have made a small dinosaur think twice.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a great question. So the first eyes that we really have evidence for come about several times independently in the Cambrian. So just after what has historically been known as the Cambrian explosion. But there's more and more evidence coming about that the Cambrian explosion is not really a huge sort of sudden radiation. It's more an explosion in preservation. And so you get this origin of all sorts of interesting new features, ISA 1 and this hard outer exoskeletons are another. So we're getting creatures that are armoured. And what I think is the case and what has been borne out by a few recent papers is that this is really when predators start going. We have the first evidence of food webs that look like the food webs of today based on demographic analyses of these sites of exceptional presentations.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the local chemistry and really acidic bottom waters that dissolve these calcium carbonate shells and yet the way that the mud is formed, it turns the sort of flesh into a clay that is just very well preserved, this illite. So yeah, it subverts all of the sort of expectations that you have. As I say, in biology, you have a law and then something will just break it. We don't have those same sort of physics rules. There's always something out there.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But by the time we get back that far, everything's pretty soft bodied. So it's really hard to find sites where they're well preserved. And we get increasingly sort of distant from the organisms we're familiar with. So identifying these very cellular processes, very soft processes. gets very, very difficult. I mean, with some sites, of course, do preserve soft tissues extremely well. I mean, we call these Lagashta, these sites of exceptional preservation. And several of those are the inspiration for these chapters. And even some like the Soon Shale in South Africa where the normal rules are completely inverted and you get muscle fiber level preservation of soft tissue and then just the hard tissue is completely dissolved and it's just a sort of yeah it's it's a it's it's an odd country”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“where there are creatures like it's called Phoenicia Dorothea, which literally means Dorothy's rope, and it's a sort of rope-shaped organism that grew anchored by one end to the sediment in these groups. And so it's thought that they would have released their sperm and eggs, their gametes at the same time, and so fertilize, and then they drift off and settle somewhere and form this new group, which is, and the evidence for this is really based on the clustering of these organisms, which you don't expect if you get the sort of asexual branching that a lot of the other organisms at that time show. So whether that's the first example of sex that happened is I'm not certain. I think it's one of the first ones where we have pretty sort of solid evidence sort of based on the demographic.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh that's a good question. So the first evidence of sex we have is, well, I believe from the Ediacara Hills, which actually one of the chapters in the book conveniently, where we get this...”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the issue then is really actually how do we interfere because most of the problems that we are developing come from this kind of short-termist interference where we just try and extract something right now and not really think about what's going to happen in 100 years and 200 years or more.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And that world has, it's evolved alongside us. I think people tend to separate the human world and the natural world. Whereas we are very much a part of it. But that also goes for, you know, we can have very positive impacts on the environments and on diversity. If you look at the pre-Columbian management of the Amazon rainforest, it's been affected by humans for thousands and thousands of years.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, oh, yes, okay. So, yes, if you just drop us entirely naked and afraid, then we're probably not going to do very well, even those that are skilled at survival. I guess that's a difficult.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There will be places where we can't survive, but that's true of the world today. If you put people in the middle of the South Pole, then they're not going to survive without really substantial infrastructure.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we would not want to arrive in the middle of a mass extinction event, I think is fair to say. But those are the sort of punctuating events that for the most part in the world isn't. I think probably we don't want to go too far back because at some point we're going to lose anything that we can eat. So we as terrestrial animals are only really going to have an environment on land realistically about as far back as the carboniferous into the Devonian there'll be fish in the sea but the diet's going to be pretty same probably not that healthy for what we're used to but from the carboniferous onwards that's really when the atmosphere begins to resemble our own anyway so I think anything at any point after that is survivable somewhere in the world”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get increasingly bad and they already are affecting the least wealthy parts of the world, which have contributed least to the problem, right? We're in a place where countries like the UK that industrialized very early and with carbon-based fuels have caused the issues that are now affecting places like the islands in the South Pacific and Bangladesh. While they have not really contributed much to that problem. So I think we need this sort of level of anyway, I'm taking this on a tangent a little bit from your original question, just because I don't think there's a lot we can predict in the bar.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a lot of traits that are very suitable for surviving mass extinction events. The one thing that is probably against us is that we're quite big and that's usually a bad sign for organisms of mass extinction events because we need a lot of food and generally take a long time to reproduce and for humans that's certainly true. But we are ecological generalists of the finest order to the extent that we modify the environment to make it within our niche, right? And that will continue to be true through tool use and so on. But we're not talking about human extinction though. When we're thinking about what happens to humans in the future, we should be thinking about actually the suffering of societies because there's a big difference between extinction and everything's fine, right? There's a graded middle in which”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“species tend to last for, I guess we could think about it in terms of a post-human world, although humans are quite good survivors, we're quite sort of a good generalist. It's difficult to see a way that we actually go extinct.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, India will continue to sort of plough up towards there. You've got the Bayer California, which is the San Andreas Fault is a famous fault where you've got that strike-slip movement. It will eventually become an island that is separated. I don't think that'll happen in five million years. That seems quite short, a timescale for that kind of thing. Yeah, in five million years that the world will not look substantially different, but there would, well, it partly depends, of course, how sea levels rise. And to some extent, when we're looking forward in time, it entirely depends what we do now, right? So if after five million years is more than twice the length of time that the genus Homo has existed, right? So predicting what the world will be like at a point that is sort of longer than most”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are some ways that you can do that. So we can predict to some extent where continents are moving because we sort of know their current trajectories and understand the mechanisms that drive that tectonic movement.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is about five million years ago at the end of the Miocene, the beginning of the Pliocene. Yeah, the whole episode is known as the Zanklian flood, which is, I think, one of the great names in paleontology and geology.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. And the rate at which it's filling, the eastern Mediterranean's filling are probably a meter a day for the amount of water that's pouring over that. And to just think of the entire ocean from essentially from Sicily to the coast of what is now Israel, just rising up a meter every day is just an incredible idea. And for the organisms”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And much, much wider than the Niagara Falls. I mean, the biggest waterfall that has ever existed. And that is what I would go to see.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this sort of jolted the land down around what is now the Straits of Gibraltar and opened the gates for what was sort of a bit like a weir-like sluice of water as the Atlantic poured into the western Mediterranean and turned the Balearic Islands back into islands and turned Corsica and Sardinia back into islands. But it came up against this barrier which is the an area of higher ground or what is now high seabed that is Italy and Sicily and Malta and the shallow seas in between them. And so after the Western Mediterranean had filled it then came to the lip of that and we can see now in the bottom of a steep submarine cliff by what is now Syracuse the remnants of a waterfall that was one and a half times the height of the angel fold.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's catastrophic of probably about one or two years. I mean, people argue about exactly how long it took. But it happened in two phases, we know this. So initially you get a strike slip earthquake. So that's when two plates go sort of parallel to one another.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, kilometer dick thick, kilometre deep deposits of salt, of halite, salt rock at the bottom of the Mediterranean. But of course, the Mediterranean's full now, so obviously it refilled at some point. And the way that it refilled.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Africa is moving northwards towards Europe, as it has been for millions of years. And at the end of the epoch, which is known as the Miocene, it had moved north to such an extent that it cut off the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean. And as it happens, the Mediterranean is in a relatively dry part of the world, and the rain that falls on it and the rivers that feed it are outweighed by the rate at which water evaporates from the surface. And so once the Mediterranean had been cut off from the Atlantic, that means that it slowly begins to evaporate and get lower and lower and saltier and saltier until we end up with this kilometers deep salt pan, which would have had extraordinary temperatures at the bottom as a result of the sort of pressure-based heating that you get when you Send”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, people ask me if I had a time machine, where would I go? And this is really the answer. Forget going back to the time of the dinosaurs and seeing the creatures that I've studied myself. I want the spectacle.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In carbon dioxide concentration over the course of the carboniferous to the extent that the trees that really facilitated this, which we call scale trees because of their sort of diamond scale pattern bark, they sort of fundamentally change the atmosphere towards a climate that couldn't really support the ecosystem they had evolved to inhabit. So scale trees would grow in two feet of water in a hot and humid swamp. When the world sort of got a bit more arid as a result of this sort of general reduction in atmospheric CO2, the swamp sort of dried up and we get what's known as the carboniferous rainforest collapse and we sort of move into this very arid world of the Permian, which is where the Gorgon comes in.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To climate change because the mere act of growing them not only produces you with material that you can turn into fabrics as well as furniture and all sorts of excellent products that we could use, but also it actually locks in carbon dioxide as a sort of byproduct. Yeah, and in the carboniferous period, we had sort of the growth of the first major forest. So there had been plants before on land, there had been a few big trees towards the end of the Devonian, but the carboniferous is the period where the real sort of plant dominated world emerges. And this huge sort of explosion in organic life, the mass of organic life, completely changed the atmosphere and we get this huge sort of reduction.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, roots are absolutely fundamental. So what you're talking about is what we call weathering of the rocks and specifically of rocks that are high in silicates. sort of delve into and sort of push apart rocks that are made of it exposes that to the air. And one of the consequences of this is that it reacts with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and locks it up as a mineral. And if you're looking up something as a mineral as opposed to say a living thing, which is going to die and then decompose and release that carbon dioxide again, it retains it within the rock. And so, I mean, there have been some people that have advocated for using plants like bamboo today, which are incredibly fast growing. They're very good at weathering rock when they do grow as a potential sort of additional solution.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and coherent even with trees remaining vertical and these then get washed out into the ocean and so these natural vegetation rafts and what is really most likely to have carried quite a lot of organisms across the ocean from you know the proto-Congo river or whatever was sort of in that position at the time”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the oligocene, South America is this sort of interesting island continent, which had evolved. It's a very unique set of mammals in particular, but fauna in general. And yet you get this influx of organisms which appear to be coming from Africa, which is the Atlantic is about half the width at that time that it is today, but it's still a substantial barrier. And yet all of the monkeys in South America, all of the rodents in South America are descended from African ancestors that got there across this Atlantic Ocean. And the idea that we, what we believe is how they got there, is that during storms, banks of big rivers can have fragments that detach and remain pretty stable.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think that it was very much at the front of my mind. There are chapters which are explicitly about topics that are very relevant to this. So, I mean, I can think of the Oligocene chapter, which is set in a place called Tingarica in Chile. And this is all about the idea of what makes sort of native species and how species move around the world, right? So right now we can have ourselves as a species transported all sorts of creatures into places where they wouldn't naturally be, whether that's deer into New Zealand because we sort of like the idea of sort of all the animals in Shakespeare being there or whether it's accidental ones like moving in ballast water of ships from one part of the oceans to another and so on. But in the”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, I mean, there are possibly a few of those out there, but I think that what's more important is acting, recognizing that if something, then it's going to be really severe, but that if we do act, we can change it and we know what to do, really. We have known actually for quite a long time what to do.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. All of these things take time, and there will be local effects as well. When people often talk about the permafrost in the Arctic melting. And that is a risk, but it will happen in some areas more than others. When you get little divots in the landscape that manage to maintain cold just through the cold air, sort of sitting in there as a little basin over time, then that will melt less. And so you'll get sort of different local effects here and there. I think we don't want to talk about sort of scary runaway tipping points because that's not.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so much more Is so one of the things which I think is a really common misconception in communication is when we talk about the error bars of what the temperature change will be by 2100, for example, the error isn't vertical. It's not in the temperature, right? We can really accurately predict from the carbon dioxide level what temperature will eventually get to. The error is horizontal. It's at what point do we get that stabilization? And so the curve looks different and then crosses 2100 at a different point. So we are currently predicting if we go through the so-called business as usual approach, which basically means that we don't try to do any kind of carbon dioxide reduction and we just carry on emitting as we have been that in 2100 we will have carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere that are the same as in the eocene.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of an epoch called the Paley scene, so it's a time known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum. And this is a time when the poles are forested. It's already quite a warm period in Earth's history. And while you don't get huge mass extinction at that time, you get real turnover in species. Ecosystems change. That's when you get the origin of what we might think of as modern faunas, the precursors to the modern fauna, before then this weird transition.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the push and press of just ecological change. I mean, when we get things, so when the Siberian traps erupted, it put a whole lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So in some senses, it's an analog to today. And you get similar patterns, deoxygenation of the ocean and increases in things like acid rain and changes to the climate. So a lot of the effects, although they took a long time to get going, are similar. And so we can sort of see how the ecosystems change over time. Right now we are experiencing the biggest increase in carbon dioxide specifically in history, as far as we can tell, in prehistory. The second fastest rise was at a time at the end.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is now Siberia, which put lava, what we call traps out over an area that is equivalent to the size of Australia today, right? So that's a very severe event over a very long period of time that ultimately changed the climate such that a lot went extinct and it was very dramatic. The only time when life has been really wiped out over an extremely short period of time is the end Cretaceous mass extinction, which everyone is kind of familiar with, which is when a meteorite struck into the shallow seas of what is now the Yucca Temins in Mexico and dinosaurs apart from birds and a whole swathe of other creatures went extinct.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for the most part, over the last, there are two sides to this. How do I get my head around millions of views? And I think partly that's just exposure through a decade of research. Oh yeah, a million years. That's fine. That's just the units we're working with. It kind of becomes condensed into something. But I mean, when we're talking about change and the rate at which things are happening, in general, even the big mass extinctions happen over a relatively long period of time, I mean from a human perspective. You know, we're talking about thousands or tens of thousands of years for the end Permian mass extinction, which is the worst of all. Paleontologists notice the great dying when 95% of life on Earth went extinct. And that was caused by vast volcanic eruptions over an extremely long period in”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“be completely extinguished all of the places in this book are gone and will never come back and we can be sort of sad about that or we can think well you know we we have ecosystems that are around today that are just as wonderful and just as marvelous it's just that we're used to them because they are the ones that are of our time”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it's trying to, I mean, the worlds of the past are very different and they have different species living there. I mean, we get to points where the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is 10 times that of the modern day, right? But the ecosystem still follow not laws exactly. Biology as a subject doesn't really have laws in the way the same way physics does, but the same sort of patterns emerge over time. And so you'll see rules like the proportion of predators in an ecosystem remain sort of relatively constant at about sort of 10% the level of the number of herbivores. And so that is a sort of, that's a rule of energy flow through food chains that is consistent. And so from a biological perspective, it's sort of explaining the ecological rules that persist even though an individual ecosystem might”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say is grounded in something, it might not be from that particular site. It might be inferred from what we know about modern biology and useful analogues in the present day, but there is a source behind everything I say that isn't just something that's more impressionistic or the emotional side of things is obviously sort of my impression of the fossil record and my sort of personal response to it. But the factual elements are all grounded in research.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and this is tooth cancer, right? It's a tumor that is developing, that is filled with teeth. And I mean, I'm sure people may have sort of seen images of those occurring in humans. And I think this is the earliest occurrence of cancer in the fossil record, right? Cancer just being a genetic condition. It's not something that has evolved over time. It's just what happens when cells divide badly. And to the injury to the leg from Abunostagos, which is later explained as being this sort of large cow-sized herbivore, sort of reptilian herbivorous animal, the fractured leg of a gorgonopsian shows, I think one from South Africa shows evidence that it has rehealed in a way that implies that it was warm-blooded like us and sort of had a mammalian physiology. So all through this, everything I...”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And although we know that the Gorgonopsians were present in Marathi, this passage is inspired by two other fossils that we do have of Gorgonopsians from other parts of the world. So we have a Gorgon which has an odontoma in its jaw, a fossil gorgon from, I think it's in Tanzania.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, specifically with that Gorgon. So for Marathi itself, it's this sort of wet desert ecosystem where it's an extremely sort of seasonal period in Earth's history. So you've got Pangaea being this sort of big C-shaped continent. And the land and then this enormous sort of C-shaped embayment of an ocean and then land to the south means that you get really strong monsoons. And so in Marathi, it's sort of at the end of where the water ends up at. So it's a bit like Lake Air in Australia today. It's this Plia Lake, which dries up and then refills. It doesn't have any exit point.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“However, her right canines are themselves already mid replacement, so a loose tooth on the left means something else. This is a more pressing development, an accident of cell division. Within her jawbone is an odontoma, a cancerous tumour pressed up against the root of her canine. The tumour is filled with miniature teeth, and as they develop they are slowly eroding the nearby root. She shifts her jaw uncomfortably in her lips. The storm will soon be over.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a member of the group Gorgonopsia like this, the apex predator at Dusty Maradi, such injuries are occasionally severe but not uncommon. The swollen jaw, though, is more unusual. Looseness in her long, sharp left canine might have been the result of a new tooth coming through, despite having differentiated teeth like mammals in Sizos, canines and post canines, Gorgon's replaced their teeth continuously, more like modern reptiles. Gorgons are active predators and need a functioning pair of upper and lower canines in order to feed. To make sure that this happens, they alternate the replacement of their left and right canines and replace both at the same time.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The injury is now healed, blood having flooded the broken area helping the living tissue to knit together quickly. A handy physiological consequence of an active, hot-blooded lifestyle, but the strengthening of the new bone growth has healed as a lump, holding the fracture together from the outside, though weaker than it once was.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is from a chapter which is set in modern day, what would become Niger, but it's 253 million years before the present. The winds have changed, northerlies blow through a sparse dune field whipping up ridges and bringing sharp shards of silicate hard and fast through the air. It is difficult to see anything distinctly. Out on the salt flat there is no respite, no place in which to hide from the deep, red, piercing wind. A female gorgon tries to lift herself from the ground, shaking away the accumulating sand as she takes another step. To resist this ongoing burial is exhausting, but sandstorms are frequent enough that this will not have been the first she has had to endure. Her thick skin, scarred with age, provides some resistance to it, if not absolute protection. The rainy season is due any day now, heralded by the return of the north wind, but until the sandstorm subsides, there is little to do but wander and wait. It has never been the same.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the ecosystem. And so that's really what the book is trying to do, trying to reconstruct these 16 sites from the last half a billion years of Earth history”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, wow, for this book in particular, one of the things that I sort of find as a mammal paleontologist is that dinosaurs get all the headlines. And so we sort of sit there thinking, well, there's all of this other amazing part of Earth's history and the history of life that just doesn't really get a look in, at least in the popular imagination. Generally people know about the time of the dinosaurs, which they sort of telescope together into this one homogenous period of time. People know about the ice age. Maybe some people have heard about the Cambrian explosion, but there's all sorts of things that happened in the hundreds of millions of years either side of these well-known periods. So that was one aspect. And then another is that I'm a big fan of nature writing. And I quite often sort of like to imagine, I mean, as a paleobiologist, what life was like? And for me, that means imagining what life was like at the level of the landscape.”
2022-05-25 · Intelligence Squared · Otherlands: A Journey Into Our Planet’s Deep Past, with Thomas Halliday · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT