Book Review: “The Last Days of the Dinosaurs” by Riley Black

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black

As I have said before, we are all Children of Chicxulub (which would be a great name for a band, no?)

The impact at Chicxulub ended the age of the dinosaurs and opened the door to the current age, an age of birds, fish, and mammals.  (And grasses and corals.  And so on.)

Pop science writer Riley concentrates on a science-based story, with lots of plausible realistic details.  (Notably, Riley is solidly in the “T. rex was covered with fuzzy feathers” camp. : – ))  The main theme is the chance and contingency of evolution.  Species evolve and die out due to constant interaction with conditions in the world and with other life. 

And then there is Chicxulub.  It was the worst day in the history of life on this planet.  Absolutely terrible luck produced pretty much the worst case scenario.  Not just a big asteroid strike, but an impact at just the wrong place, at a particularly bad angle. 

Reflecting recent research results, Riley recounts the overwhelming scale speed of the disaster.  The whole world was engulfed in a huge heat wave and firestorm within hours of the impact.  Earthquakes and tsunamis pounded many places.  The sun was blotted out for a year, the atmosphere was filled with debris for centuries.

The surprise is not that the dinosaurs died out, it’s that anything at all survived.

Riley recounts plausible scenarios for what survived and how they might have managed.  Mostly a combination of lucky attributes and lucky circumstances, in this telling.  The survivors were creatures that managed to survive the firestorm, and were somehow able to emerge and survive in the aftermath.  The lucky few.

Riley spaces forward, telling tales of repopulation.  This story is not only about luck, but it is about relationships (the lucky survival of certain plants was an opportunity for certain animals, etc.)  But this “recovery” was actually a burst of new development, because, as Riley emphasizes, you can’t go backwards.  Surviving birds were too different from non-avian dinosaurs to “evolve back” to T. rex or Tricerotops.  They could only go forward to become penguins, ostriches, and crows.

In the conclusion, Riley muses on why we love dinosaurs.  As she(?) notes, we aren’t gaga over Trilobites or other extinct species.  So why are we so fascinated with non-avian dinosaurs? 

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This is a work of pop science.  In order to tell a compelling story, Riley must get specific, imagining the appearance and behavior of ancient life forms in very specific detail.  Fuzzy, feathery T. rex.  Spotted and striped color schemes.  Hoots, grunts, and bird songs.  And so on.

Experience tells us that in the future, with more discoveries, many of these details will turn out to be wrong.  But Riley is very careful to hew close to what can be supported by current evidence, along with plausible hypothesis. 

In fact, a quarter of the book is an appendix that is basically one long footnote documenting the underlying evidence.  (“Showing her work”, she says.)

Myself, I’m really into footnotes, myself.  But I’m not especially fond of this particular style. I like my footnotes close by—and with citations I can look up.

However….the appendix is interesting because Riley gets a bit meta here, and explains what story he was aiming to tell in each chapter.  Throughout human history, one of the big draws of dinosaurs is that they feed into the stories we tell.  So, as ever, Riley’s story reflect his times.

In ancient times, remains of dinosaurs were evidence of gods and giants.  Dinosaurs were the proof of dragons everywhere.  As dinosaurs were recognized as extinct species, they provided evidence of the Biblical flood.  Victorians fit dinosaurs into their story of the ascent of (British) man.  In America, dinosaurs became the poster children for the creative destruction of unfettered capitalism.  In Hollywood, dinosaurs still inhabit fantastic lost worlds, unsullied by dirty apes.

And so on.

So, Riley’s story comes out of contemporary American new agey capitalism, of course.  Evolution is not a race to fill a collection of Platonic niches, he tells us.  Niches (opportunity) are created, not found.  Indeed, niches are created by creating “ecosystems”, in which all the players create opportunities for more players.  The winners aren’t the most prepared, they are the agile generalists who get lucky.

This stuff comes right out of the business section at the airport bookstore! (It also sounds like the folklore of the software biz, which is often driven by unplanned relationships and contingencies.)

There are personal touches in the book, of course.

In her musings about “why we love dinosaurs”, Riley waxes poetic about wanting to actually touch the famous K-Pg Iridium deposits at Hells Creek.  I get that.  This is definitely on any nerd’s bucket list.

However.

For me, at least one reason I love dinosaurs is that they take me away from mundane things like the details of contemporary life. I’m not especially interested in confessions about the personal lives of science writers. This is a trend in pop science is not a plus for me.

I’m just sayin’.

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1. Riley Black, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2022.

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