This is CBSi in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Thomas Halliday, a paleontologist and author

writing magically and convincingly of other lands journey through Earth's extinct worlds.

This is before the asteroid, before the death of the dinosaurs, is called the Cretaceous Period,

125 million years ago.

And I learned from Thomas to call dinosaurs knuckle walkers.

What does that mean, Thomas?

Knuckle workers.

And I suppose what you're talking about is is sort of some of the

titanesaurian sauroposis. Yeah the titanesaurus was a knuckle walker and yeah they

picture it for me. Well I mean the reason I call the knuckle workers is because they

through their evolution when they're attaining such large sizes. In order to have this kind of pillar-like limb one of the things that Titanosaurs in particular do is they lose the bones that are the same as our fingers. They lose their digit bones and so their their front feet are essentially just highly sort of modified hand bones.

They're working on the ends of their knuckles.

So that's what I meant by that way.

Oh, we, you write that this is the heyday of non-avian dinosaurs.

The titanesaurus is 17 meters long, very large.

And these are herbivores.

They're eating the the gener the the

prosperity of the earth. What do the what does the forest look like at this time?

My note says cypress trees. Yeah, this is a time, this is back in the early Cretaceous, this particular site a wonderful

environment in Liaoning in China.

And at this time, flowering plants hadn't got going. So we're not seeing, or rather they had begun to exist. The very earliest flowering plants are from this site, places like archifutras and so on. But mostly these forests are made up of conifers and of ginkos and cycabs and so and so it's probably a less colourful

forest than the one that we're familiar with today and but yes still I sort of you know it's still a sort of, you know, it's a diverse place.

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