This is 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 Myosene. Myosene, 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. The rocks themselves are considerably older than the fossils. But the

fossils, when they formed about 5 million years ago, they are washed into the caves, and

we find them in these caustic deposits. Do you find the saber tooth deer there? Is that

where his and her bones are? Absolutely. There are a few species of deer,

today like must deer, for example, that have saber teeth. But yes, Hoplittomeric is a

wonderful deal like organism from Gargano. What's more unusual, perhaps than the saber teeth,

is that it has five horns on its head, giving it sort of, I mean, almost, from some angles

that's fairly demonic, but they were practical. They had a predator they could send off, how

so? Well, so the predator, the major predator, it seems on this island. One of the interesting

things about islands is that it's always a sub-sample of the population of a mainland.

So there aren't any big mammalian predators, but there are these giant buzzard relatives,

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