Book Week 2025, Day 5: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, by Riley Black

I put these Book Week posts into sequence with a level of forethought about one notch above pure randomness, but a felicity emerged. It’s useful for me to cover The Last Days of the Dinosaurs after the previous three books, each for a particular reason. As I did with Steve Brusatte, I’ve tracked Riley Black’s career since its inception, from their old blog, Laelaps (since superseded by the currently active Tooth and Bone), and the book Written in Stone (2010). It’s been a satisfying evolution to follow, as Riley’s voice and range as a writer have developed and deepened. In the same way that my post on Dr. Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs serves as a belated shout-out to Mark Witton, this one is a long-overdue acknowledgement of Riley’s steady, determined, seemingly-inevitable-in-hindsight rise to prominence as a now multiply-award-winning writer. I’ve been following all along, and her current — and well-earned — success stands on the usual pillars: time, patience, grit, and, in Robert McKee’s memorable formulation, “the work, the work, all the work”.

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs shares with Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands a stride-through-time structure, but running forward in time where Otherlands dove into the increasingly remote past. The book starts with the Chicxulub impact, and narrates what happened in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation and in the wider world at ever-expanding intervals: an hour post-impact, then a day, a week, a month, a year, and so on, out to one million years into the Paleogene. Like Otherlands, it’s both an exhaustively-researched tour de force, and a compellingly told story. The story here is an imperial drama on the largest possible stage, involving the rapid unmaking of one dynasty — that of the non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine reptiles — and the rather more protracted rise of its successor, our familiar world in which mammals, birds, and flowering plants get top billing in most times and places, but reptiles, amphibians, conifers, ferns, and many other forms of life keep on keeping on.

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is by turns pitiless and hopeful, showcasing both the terrifying fragility of life, from individuals to species to ecosystems, in a sometimes violent universe, and the resilience of life in the wake of the grimmest and most implacable catastrophes. (It also left me really, really hoping for more civilization-level investment in asteroid defense.) The constant note ringing through the book is that “our familiar world” simply would not exist without the impact and its aftermath. Non-avian dinosaurs were changing and evolving in the latest Cretaceous, as they had been for nearly 180 million years, but the idea, still prevalent in some circles when I was a kid and even in college, that the end-Cretaceous turnover was some kind of intrinsic and inevitable replacement driven by superior biology is now deader than, well, you know. If the asteroid had missed, we might have gotten some elements of Dougal Dixon’s New Dinosaurs, but we most assuredly would not have gotten the world we enjoy today, and “we” would almost certainly be living in trees and holes, eating insects and fruit, and picking nits instead of pecking keys. It’s one thing to know that intellectually — that our very existence hinged on an improbable astronomical event — and another to be led through the horrible, grinding aftermath of the cataclysm by a knowledgeable guide. In Riley Black, this particular inferno has found its Virgil.