Thomas Halliday (32 years old, Edinburgh) clarifies that he did not decide to be a paleontologist because the film jurassic-park it will change his life. The reality was much less fictional: after studying biology at university for several years, in his last year he attended several paleontology classes and chose to follow that path, which has led him to publish Other worlds (Debate). With this story, which he wrote in less than 18 months, he intends to challenge preconceived ideas about the Earth’s past, such as that it was inhabited by monstrous beings that devastated everything in their path: “I wanted to present living beings that used to inhabit our planet as such, as creatures,” he explains.
The author has woven the narrative thread starting from the most recent to the most remote, without leaving out any of the great extinctions that took place in the past, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs after the impact of a 10-kilometer-wide meteorite. With suggestive prose, he describes in detail the ecosystems that no longer exist, so that the reader finds himself, suddenly, in the middle of the mammoth steppe, surrounded by two-meter-tall penguins, in the company of dinosaurs the size of of a dog or in Pangea, when all the continents were one. Halliday seeks to travel back in time and take us with him. During a lightning visit to Madrid, he attended EL PAÍS at the offices of the Penguin Random House publishing house.
Ask. When did you start having concerns about nature?
Response. I grew up in the Scottish Highlands, watching the birds, the deer… It was a wonderful place for a 10 year old.
P. What led you to write this story?
R. There were several reasons. Among them, the way in which paleontology is presented to the public, usually in a monstrous way, with aggressive dinosaurs constantly trying to eat everything regardless of whether it makes any sense to do so or not. People usually know about the ice age and something about the age of the dinosaurs or about the Cambrian explosion, but between those phases there are many gaps that are equally interesting and that I wanted to show.
P. How was the writing process?
R. I decided early on to devote a chapter to each geological age. I chose locations from around the world with the goal that all modern continents would be included, so that I could also represent the diversity of ecosystems that once existed. If only the best preserved places had been chosen, they would all have been shallow lagoons and the lakes that existed in the mountains and another variety of ecosystems would not have appeared.
P. Did you travel to the enclaves included in the book?
R. No. As they are places that existed millions and millions of years ago, if we were to visit them now, they would be extremely different. I have been to places that are similar, analogous, but found in other places. I relied in part on those other sites to write the story to make the process a little more immersive.
P. Throughout the story he mentions several times that you have to imagine the past to some extent. What margin of error is there?
R. All factual elements are based on scientific evidence. It can be direct, based on the anatomy of a skeleton, for example, or indirect, with aspects that must be inferred, such as behaviors with which analogies must be established between extinct animals and those of today. You see an animal now and you can imagine what its ancestors were like. The part that has to do with imagination is the feeling of how you react to the past. Obviously, there are parts that are better supported by scientific evidence than others, but, when there is a conflict between theories, for the sake of the narrative, I take only one of the plausible theories, the one that is better supported. What is advantageous about writing is that, when you are describing with words, you can ignore what you really don’t know and speak only of what you are sure of, whereas, in a painting, for example, you cannot leave an animal without a word. part.
P. In the book he talks about the illusion of stability that we humans have. How could we relate that to climate change and the fears we have about the future?
R. Human beings tend to think that we are something intrinsic to the world, but we are only a part of the world that exists right now, which is a very small portion of the entire history of the planet. There is an idea of fragility in life. What fossils show us is that those worlds that existed and prospered have disappeared. Life itself remains, but the way it does so, the forms of life, can radically change.
P. There are several chapters that deal with disruptive changes, great catastrophes, such as the impact of the great meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs. Could it be said that climate change is the most abrupt that the Earth has experienced? Or what differentiates it from those that have taken place before?
R. The extinction caused by the meteorite was unique. It is the only one that, in addition, has been produced by an external or extraterrestrial agent. The rest were caused by climatic changes in relatively short periods of time. The changes we are seeing today are as fast or even faster than those that occurred in previous mass extinctions. If we think about the change that occurred at the end of the Permian era, 250 million years ago, things were quite similar to what is happening now, such as oxygen disappearing from the bottom of the oceans, the presence of large amounts of greenhouse gases greenhouse (which then emanated from a volcanic area the size of Australia and today is due to the emission of fossil fuels)… In that extinction 95% of life disappeared.
P. Having written this book and having seen that, despite tremendously catastrophic situations, life always remains one way or another, has it helped you to be optimistic about the current situation in the world?
R. Not necessarily. I think I am optimistic, but, more than that, because I trust that, as a society, we can see what is happening, what we are doing, and we have the ability to prevent it. The fact that life remains after a mass extinction should not be a source of comfort because, each time one occurs, life returns in a totally different way and the world of the Cretaceous or the Paleocene, although they were close, were enormously different. each.
P. In Other worlds explains how politics and the construction of borders have influenced the management of native species and the fact that they are considered foreign even when they have been in an area for millions of years. In what other ways has politics influenced nature?
R. As human beings we continually modify our environment. In the UK many people think of the Scottish Highlands as wild, idyllic places… but they have been radically transformed by agriculture, forestry, hunting… The natural ecosystem in Scotland would be a rainforest if it hadn’t been changed, but now they are mountains. Many people live in these habitats and they have to have a livelihood, so it’s also important to think not only about “saving the whales”, but how that can affect people, how they are going to be able to survive.
P. Throughout history, animals (and humans for as long as we have existed) have adapted to their environment. Would you say that you are adapting faster to changes now?
R. Adaptation is conditioned by the time it takes for one generation to produce the next. Animals with longer generation processes tend to go extinct faster. There are now microbes that have adapted to eating plastic and have very short generation times, so they can evolve very quickly. And the rate at which we are changing our environment is too fast for most organisms to adapt. Sometimes they can keep up with the environment, but it is not always possible, especially when it comes to the poles or mountains, where there is limited space.
P. What most caught your attention during your research? Perhaps the monkeys that crossed the Atlantic on natural rafts during the Oligocene (32 million years ago)?
R. That is a very beautiful story, one that is hard to believe. All monkeys in South America have descended from an ancestral population that somehow arrived from Africa. Paleontologists of the past tried to find out how it happened. They imagined some land bridges they had crossed, but there is no evidence that they existed. We know that some species can cross large expanses of the ocean. For example, the iguanas of Antigua crossed from one island to another, and the fishermen were witnesses. That’s a smaller distance, but when we talk about geological time periods, there’s plenty of time for all this to happen. I really think that’s the best anecdote, you can imagine the monkeys on the raft not knowing what was going on (laughs).
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