James Nicoll Reviews

Riley Black’s 2022 The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is a popular science book.

Last Days is not, as one might expect from the title, focused on the non-avian dinosaurs’ sudden demise, although that is covered. The subtitle reads ​“An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World” for a reason.

Every beginning begins with an end. Sixty-six million years ago, an Everest-sized rock slammed into the Yucatan at interplanetary speeds, erasing one world and making room for ours.

The non-avian dinosaurs had company in death. Three quarters of all plant and animal species were wiped out as well. The object that hit the Earth sixty-six million years ago was not the first extraplanetary object to hit the Earth. It was not the largest, not even in recent memory: the thirty-three-million-year-old Popigai crater, for example, is larger, but not associated with the near-complete ecological replacement after the Chicxulub impact. What made Chicxulub special?

Black first establishes the conditions that prevailed at the end of the Cretaceous, with particular attention on the Hell Creek region. Black provides an explanation of the things that made this impact so destructive, before presenting the reader with snapshots of the devastated world after the impact, then the process that led from the denuded landscape immediately after impact to the beginning of the world we now know. As the table of contents makes clear¹, each chapter covers increasingly long periods of time, necessary to cover the time required for ecological recovery in a book light enough to hold in one hand.

Black aims at a generalist audience, carefully explaining concepts with which the general reader might not be familiar: life not following any sort of pre-set plan but rather shaped by circumstance, luck being a major one. The text incorporates recent research, providing readers with some idea of the current consensus about the end of the dinosaurs and the rise of mammals².

A novel feature of this book is that rather than delivering the information in austere exposition, the author provides a narrative. Therefore, readers are not merely treated to apocalypse and its aftermath. They are treated to the miserable demises of animals about whose fates readers may well care.

I do read papers about dinosaurs and the like, so a lot of this material was familiar to me. However, I didn’t have it all in one place. Also, Black cast light on subjects easily overlooked, such as the unending horror that is the natural world. If you’re not being eaten alive by large predators, you’re probably being eaten alive by small parasites.

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs was both informative and entertaining. I would recommend it to people with specific interest in dinosaurs or even just a general interest in the various environmental regimes the Earth has witnessed. It was a very pleasant way to spend an evening [3].

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: The table of contents reads in part:

Preface

Geologic Timeline

Introduction

1. Before Impact 

2. Impact

3. The First Hour

4. The First Day

5. The First Month

6. One Year After Impact

7. One Hundred Years After Impact

8. One Thousand Years After Impact

9. One Hundred Thousand Years After Impact

10. One Million Years After Impact

The chapter headings provide an accurate guide what to expect.

2: Obligatory disclaimer that mammals were around before the non-avian dinosaurs got it in the neck. Age of the Dinosaurs and Age of the Mammals misleads by focusing on flashy, large animals. It’s all just different Ages of Plants and Bugs, really. The big animals are just garnish.

3: I enjoyed reading it. Obviously, the actual events sucked from the perspective of the dinosaurs.