The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (Riley Black)

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World
Riley Black
St. Martin's Press
Nonfiction, Dinosaurs/Science
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Death came for the dinosaurs on an otherwise ordinary day approximately 66 million years ago, a seven-mile-wide rock plunging through the atmosphere at unthinkable speeds, unleashing unimaginable devastation. There are many places it might have struck where the devastation would've been less complete, but luck was not with the Earth that day. Massive quakes, volcanoes, a global ash blanket and years-long winter, poisoned air, acid rain... In the hours, days, months, and years to follow, the fallout would continue to resonate around the world. Of those who survived the initial impact, many would succumb afterward... but from those who survived would come a rebirth, new species proliferating, eventually leading to a particular species of upright-walking mammal who would look back upon that lost world in wonder. Using science and speculation, author Riley Black recreates snapshots of those days of devastation and renewal.

REVIEW: Many people look back upon the Age of Dinosaurs with both awe and regret. Awe at the sheer scale and diversity and strange nature of the extinct animals that once walked our Earth, even as glimpsed through the fragmentary fossil record from millions of years in the future. Regret that, barring time travel, we will never actually meet the former "rulers" of the world. But people tend to forget, or simply gloss over, that just because they were the dominant and most noticeable life forms, the dinosaurs were never alone; there were plants, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and more sharing that world... and they, too, were impacted by the asteroid impact that would utterly transform life on Earth in its wake. Black emphasizes this interconnected nature of life in ways that several books seem to overlook as she recreates moments around the world, moving from the hours just before the strike to the immediate and longer-term aftermath. This approach paints vivid pictures, if sometimes quite bleak ones, of what the survivors endured, as well as how much sheer evolutionary happenstance played into what species lived and which perished. The sheer scale of devastation utterly boggles the imagination, but what's almost harder to wrap one's mind around is how anything at all survived... and not only survived, but eventually flourished. It is no exaggeration to say that we owe our current world, and our very existence, to that wayward space rock, which destroyed so much but also created conditions for a new world to rise from the ashes, if one forever marked by the tragedy. As we barrel into a new age of mass extinctions and rapidly shifting climate (nowhere near as immediately catastrophic as that asteroid, but just as potentially fatal to our species and numerous others), it offers some hope that, even out of all this devastation, something beautiful might eventually arise... even if no human eye is there to witness its flowering.

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