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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten.

Today in the podcast, a romp through the prehistoric leaf pile.

It's kind of like an endless salad bar for some of these ancient cruders.

When you close your eyes and imagine prehistoric life, what comes to mind?

For me, and probably for a lot of us, it's the dinosaurs.

The long neck to patasaurus, the flying

terrosaurs, that big old toothy T-Rex. But what don't get as much love are the organisms

living alongside them and underfoot, the prehistoric plants. But according to my next

guest, we need to stop throwing shade on plants because they are the unsung

heroes of evolutionary history. Here to tell us why is Riley Black, paleontologist and author

of the new book, When the Earth Was Green, Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance.

Riley is based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Welcome back to Science Friday.

Always a joy to be here. Thank you. Your book challenges us to set aside the dinosaurs, put on our green-tinted glasses, and focus instead on plants. Make the case.

A dinosaur by itself, when you imagine something like an apatosaurus, they're just existing in a void.

Otherwise, they're divorced from their ecological context. So all the food they need to eat,

all the environments that allow them to live and thrive as they did for so long. We can't understand

any of that whatsoever. The shape of that animal is really shaped by the plants that it ate,

the ginkos and horsetails and conifers that were around at that time. And in a sense, you know,

this dancer is not a machine, but it evolves specifically

to wharf down as much vegetation as possible, to grow really quickly, to get out of danger

from the predatory dinosaurs that are around at this time. So it's this whole ecological

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