The Last Days of the Dinosaurs

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, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe.

Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It's a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana 66 million years ago. In a matter of hours, everything here will be wiped away. Tyrannosaurus rex will be toppled from their throne, along with every other species of non-avian dinosaur no matter their size, diet, or disposition. They just don't know it yet. 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 vanished seemingly overnight. But this worst single day in the history of life on 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.

“A marvelous look at what happened after the asteroid hit Earth will make readers feel like a kid discovering dinosaurs for the first time.” -NEWSWEEK