Your birding book notes are interesting, thank you.

Otherlands by Thomas Halliday might appeal to you. It's mostly palaeoecology and he works backwards so it feels too mammal and then too tetrapod at the beginning but he evens that out as well as possible, bearing in mind the available fossilised environments. The author is a scientist so it's more detailed and less journalistic than many popular science books. I enjoyed it.