Ideas from the CBC: Thomas Halliday: History of Extinct Ecosystems

The story of complex life on Earth is one of disruption. Ecosystems and the species within them rise and flourish, and they are either snuffed out by extinction or evolve into something better suited to a changed environment. Everything living today is the descendant of those survivor species. In his book, Otherlands, British paleontologist Thomas Halliday describes 16 ecosystems from the Earth's deep past and the catastrophic mass extinction that ended some of them — all part of the dance of evolution and extinction that has played out over hundreds of millions of years.