Carboniferous

…Way, way, as in hundreds of millions of years, as the rule of amphibians began not just before the ice age, but even before the dinosaurs, with the beginning of this story starting during the Carboniferous.…

…And if you find yourself dreaming of something with wings far too wide for any modern world, moving through air too thick and rich to breathe well, that's just the Carboniferous.…

…It is beneath you, and within you, and in the air that surrounds you, the air whose composition has been changed by the compressed remains of ancient forests, and is being further changed, right now, in real time, by processes that the fossil record of the Carboniferous illuminates better than almost any other source of evidence.…