Review: Riley Black’s “The Last Days of the Dinosaurs”

“This is a story about the meek inheriting the Earth.”

Nothing piques the human imagination quite like prehistoric animals. There is something almost mythical and fantastic about these creatures. Of these, dinosaurs come foremost to mind. Dinosaurs always provoke nostalgia, whether they take us back to our own childhood or carry us to eons past, wondrous and unseen. Nevertheless, the terrible lizards are no longer with us. They were killed off long ago–perhaps more swiftly than many passing dino aficionados assume.

One of the prevailing suppositions regarding the end of the Age of Dinosaurs is the theory that an Earth-shattering asteroid caused extensive ecological annihilation. (Scientists put forward the Chicxulub crater as an indicator of this cataclysm.) Riley Black’s recent book The Last Days of the Dinosaurs gives us a scenario deviating somewhat from the stereotypical representation of the asteroid smashing into our home planet: a scenario that is also a bit more fleshed out than the traditional story. For one, it is likely that the iconic image of a fireball descending through the sky never occurred. Black speculates that the sheer velocity of the space rock would make it improbable that any sign of its entry into the atmosphere would be visible before impact. Afterward was another matter. Few organisms escaped the effects of the asteroid.

Debris from the collision was tossed high into the atmosphere, and the air grew fiercely hot. In Black’s envisioning of the extinction event, this “global infrared heat pulse” was unbearable. Temperatures could easily have hit 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the dinos could not take the heat, the author surmises, and they died off within a matter of days or even hours. But Black’s narrative is about more than just dinosaurs. The faces of other bygone critters make plenty of cameos.