The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction and the Beginning of Our World

By Riley Black

Some 66 million years ago, an asteroid some seven miles across slammed into the Earth, leaving a geologic wound over 50 miles in diameter. In the terrible mass extinction that followed, more than half of known species vanish seemingly overnight. But this worst single day in the history of life of Earth was as critical for us as it was for the dinosaurs, as it allowed for evolutionary opportunities that were closed for the previous 100 million years. In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black walks readers through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries and the million years after the impact. Life's losses were sharp and deeply felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781803990729

Riley Black

Riley Black has been heralded as ‘one of our premier gifted young science writers’ and is the critically acclaimed author of Skeleton Keys, My Beloved Brontosaurus, Written in Stone, When Dinosaurs Ruled and Deep Time. Her work has appeared in Science, The New York Times, Nature, Smithsonian and more. Black also has a strong online presence, connecting with over 27,000 followers on Twitter, and has written on nerdy pop culture for websites like Slate, io9 and the Guardian. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Reviews for The Last Days of the Dinosaurs

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Riley Black is a science writer of the deep past who in a number of books brings alive plants and animals that no longer exist. Her technique is to zoom in on a particular individual animal, establish it's maybe tired or hungry or seeking shade, then weave in the meat, the science facts. It does work without being too juvenile or cumbersome, it keeps you interested. The focus is on the Hell Creek Formation in Montana (Fort Peck Lake) 66 million years ago and chapters are the day of impact, the day after, 1 year after, 100 years, 1000 years etc.. One might think there would be piles of bones fossilized from this event from billions of dead animals, but there are actually very few: acid rain for years after. She reminds that the species who survived did so because of random evolutionary chance - for example turtles who can absorb oxygen through their butt were able to stay underwater long enough to avoid being cooked on the surface. Among avian dinosaurs (birds), there were two kinds - those with hard beaks for breaking open seeds, and those with toothy beaks for eating meat. The later did not survive because large animals were wiped out and there was no meat left, but the beaked birds could peck seeds from the wasteland like chickens in the desert. Totally random adaptation allowed them to survive. So our world today reflects this randomness of a single event 66 million years ago in present-day Mexico. Nobody could have guessed how things would turn out, evolution is too indeterminate, but we could say once the dinosaurs were gone it was highly unlikely they would return, the random chances that saw their rise would not repeat the same way again.