This is CBS Island of the World. I'm John Bachelorette 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, I suppose what you're talking about, is some of the Titanosaurian

sauropods. Yeah, the Titanosaurus that was a knuckle walker.

Yeah, they picture. Well, I mean, the reason I call them knuckle walkers is because they

threw their evolution when they're attaining such large sizes. In order to have this kind of

pillar-like limb, one of the things that Titanosaur is in particular, do is they lose the bones that

are the same as our fingers. They lose their digibons. And so their front feet are essentially

just highly sort of modified hand bones. They're working on the ends of their knuckle. So that's

what I meant by that way. Are we, you write that this is the heyday of non-avian dinosaurs,

the Titanosaurus is 17 meters long, very large. And these are herbivores. They're reading the

prosperity of the earth. What does the forest look like at this time? My note says cypress trees.

This is a time, this is back in the early Cretaceous, this particular cypress, a wonderful

environment in Liao Ning 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 Archifurc just and so on. But mostly these forests are made up of

of colifers and of ginkos and cycaps and seedfans and so on. So it's probably a less colorful

forest than the one that we're familiar with today. But still, it's a diverse place.

Dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes from those enormous 17 meter long Titanosaurus to

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