This is a CBSI on the world. I'm John Bachelor. Thomas Halliday, his new book is Other

Lands, a journey through Earth's extinct worlds. We're going backwards in time to 500 million years ago when we got organized for creatures.

Right now we're at 5.3 million years ago, the Miocene, and what we're looking at here is a very large Mediterranean basin that doesn't have any water in it.

And the filling in of that basin will create opportunities for animals, sometimes dwarves and sometimes

giants. It's all something of a theater piece. And the way you write it Thomas is so wonderful.

Let's get to where is Gargano Island?

What does it look like today?

Today Gargano is a peninsula on the east coast of Italy, about two-thirds of the way down, sticking out into the Adriatic Sea, and it's this sort of large hilly limestone region,

full of these wonderful caustic caves

with stalactites and stalactites

and so you can explore.

And those caves are really where

the fossils have been found, right, the rocks themselves are considerably older than the fossils.

But the fossils, when they formed about five million years ago, they are washed into the caves,

and so we sort of find them in these in these

karstic deposits. Do you find the saber-toothed deer there is that where

his and her bones are? Absolutely and there are a few species of deer today like mus deer for example that have saber teeth.

But yes, Hopletomerics is a wonderful some deer-like organism from Gargano.

What's more unusual perhaps than the saber teeth

is that it has five horns on its heads,

giving it this sort of, I mean, almost, from some angles it's fairly demonic,

appearance.

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