A wander through 500 million years
OTHERLANDS, by Thomas Halliday (Allen Lane, $40)
What did the world smell like 309 million years ago? If you haven’t given this much thought, Thomas Halliday has. At a boggy site now known as Mazon Creek in Illinois, writes the palaeobiologist, the dark water “reek[ed] of slow decay, of rotting trunks and the blackening stalks of ferns”.
You are cordially invited to a smelly evening in the Carboniferous, on the western coast of
