we will show that smooth complete solutions to the ricci flow of uniformly bounded curvature are analytic in time in the interior of their interval of existence. the analyticity is a consequence of classical bernstein-bando-shi type estimates on the temporal and spatial derivatives of the curvature tensor, and offers an alternative proof of the unique continuation of solutions to the ricci flow. as a further application of these estimates, we will show that, under the above global hypotheses, about any interior space-time point (x0, t0), there exist local coordinates x on a neighborhood u of x0 in which the representation of the metric is real-analytic in both x and t on some cylinder over u.