Lost Worlds of the Past: Strange Creatures That Lived Before Dinosaurs: 4

Before the dinosaurs ruled the Earth, stranger creatures dominated its oceans, forests and vast ancient plains. Journey hundreds of millions of years into the past and discover the extraordinary lost worlds of the Palaeozoic Era. Meet armoured trilobites crawling across Cambrian seabeds, giant sea scorpions hunting in ancient waters, fishes developing the first jaws, and lobe-finned swimmers whose descendants would eventually walk on land. Explore towering Carboniferous forests filled with enormous arthropods, encounter sail-backed Dimetrodon, and follow the rise of the therapsids-the remarkable branch of life that would one day produce mammals. Along the way, uncover how plants transformed the continents, why vertebrates evolved limbs and amniotic eggs, and how scientists use fossils, rocks, footprints and chemical clues to reconstruct worlds no human ever witnessed. The journey ends with the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history, a catastrophe that destroyed most species but left behind the survivors from which the age of dinosaurs would eventually arise. Serious, exciting and grounded in modern palaeontology, Lost Worlds of the Past reveals that prehistoric history did not begin with dinosaurs. For more than 300 million years before they appeared, life had already been evolving, competing and transforming the planet in astonishing ways.