This is CBSi and the world. I'm John Bachelor with Thomas Halliday. His book is Other Lands, taking us back and back to 500 million years ago and more. We go now to the cambrian. This is a present day

fossils in China and the scene is set by Thomas's magical writing. The land was desolate and dry. There was an extreme

greenhouse world and we're looking at what was happening underwater in the sea in the vast sea.

Thomas you report that all modern fila were present at this moment right now.

So all of what we are is descended from here. Where

where should we look? Should we look at the fish? Should we look at the

sponges? The worm-like worms? where do we come from?

Well, in during the Cambrian, this is classically thought of a cambrian explosion where you get the first

representatives of all of the filer.

So a filum in a biological sense

is really a group that shares the same kind of body plans.

So a vertebrates as a whole are a fileum.

So the fileum that includes fish and you and me and

reptiles and birds and frogs and everything else with a backbone and so some of the earliest vertebrates are here at the time.

And so you've got things like Hyguic this, for example, which is this very simple fish like Bertaut, but also several sort of wormy creatures

that will eventually give rise to arthropods, to those insects and crabs and lobsters and so on.

And at Cheng Jang, we do see representatives of most of the modern filer.

I think I'm right in saying that there are no echinoderms, which is a group that includes

starfish and sea actions and so on at this place, but that's preservational issue that sort of their bodies have just simply not

been preserved at Chang'ang, but are known from elsewhere around in the world.

So I mean it depends really what you want to ask.

All right I want to you know I've got a thing for apex predators so I'm going to go to the

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