This is a

is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Bachelor.

Thomas Halliday, the author of the new book Other Lands, A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds.

Thomas is a paleontologist and an evolutionary biologist.

We'd go now to some part of human history that is present in the 20th century, a very

famous movie called Jurassic Park. Well we're going to the real Jurassic, 155 million years ago.

This is a time that Thomas reports was time for recovery from an extinction event that happened

some 50 million years before, the Triassic Jurassic Extinction.

We're now in a piece of land that we think of as Germany today,

Swabia Germany.

And why this is all important is that we're looking at the

recovery from what I presume was a climate change extinction. Is that correct, Thomas? is that the thinking about what

happened? The Triassic Jurassic extinction is one of the most hotly debated

extinctions in terms of of course but the the leading candidate for this is that you is runaway

climate change and because we appear to have had a sort of emission of

sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide all of these sorts of gases that warm the atmosphere and

acidify the oceans.

And so when I'm talking about this as a time of recovery, what it's particularly a time of recovery

for is marine reptiles

which are almost the classic organisms from the Jurassic and the Jurassic of Europe

which is of course where we are in Germany is a time when Europe is a tropical archipelago rather like the Caribbean is today.

It's at the meeting point of three oceans.

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