Jonathan McRae

All right, our final story, very quickly, Susan.

Sorry, processed foods are bad.

We say it all the time, you know, we hear it all the time, but actually, you know, thinking about eating ultra processed food, how that's made, what happens to the nutrients in that food, how it's presented to us and how we consume it.

You know, it's crazy how these large food companies have managed to dominate our local shops.

You know, they're talking about food deserts.

You know, food deserts in Britain, they talk about that actually you can't get healthy food in a five mile radius and you end up eating this stuff.

There's a shop in Tallaght near the Tallaght National Stadium and it's the closest, you know, nearby local shop.

If you walk in there, like the neon colours of all of these ultra-processed foods will actually blind you.

It's kind of crazy that this is a normal food environment.

All right.

Susan, Shane, thank you very much.

So when we think about the deep past, we often think about dinosaurs and T-Rexes and woolly mammoths.

We don't think about plants.

And before we had trees, we had eight-meter-high thingies that are absolutely fascinating and seem to be everywhere.

They were called prototaxites.

And Corentin Laurent is a paleobiologist at Trinity College Dublin.

He's here now to explain all about them.

So welcome to the program, Corentin.

Tell me a little bit about, just set the scene, what part of our ancient history are we talking about?

You call them organisms rather than plants.