![]() ![]() ![]() In this podcast episode, we speak with Halliday about his travel guide to the history of multicellular life on Earth, the fragility of ecosystems, how entire extinct worlds are reconstructed from remnants in the Earth’s crust, and the importance of realizing that the lives and the worlds that we know were preceded by hundreds of millions of years of other life and other worlds, “simultaneously fabulous yet familiar. Lives leave their marks in detailed, reproducible ways.” – Thomas Halliday The scars of life are there, with fractures sustained knitted together. The high-set eyes and nostrils speak of low swimming, peering, and breathing just above the water surface the long series of teeth, pointed but round, and set in a long, sweeping snout, suggest a feeding style of swiping, grabbing and holding prey, suitable for catching slippery fish. The buttressed processes and arches evoke Gothic architecture, here resisting not the weight of a cathedral roof but the powerful force of the jaw muscles. “To look at the skull of an extant freshwater crocodile is to read a character description. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |