Dinosaurs Are the Stars in This Engaging Narrative

Science writer and amateur paleontologist Riley Black shares how she wrote one of the most creative science books of the last couple of years

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is an engaging look at what happened before and after a giant asteroid impacted our planet, St. Martin’s Press

At Smithsonian magazine, a lot of new science books come across my desk. I can’t cover most of them. But two years ago, a book struck me with its creativity from the moment I opened it up. The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, by Riley Black, was different than so many others. Rather than a standard tale of scientists going on a quest to understand dinosaurs, the creatures were the central characters. In the book, Black shares the stories of animals that lived before and after a cataclysmic event 66 million years ago—when a seven-mile rock from space crashed into the Earth and led to the extinction of 75 percent of species.

Missing from the book are the technical details on how dinosaur discoveries are made and why they are important. Instead, Black shares a flowing narrative that focuses on how the creatures interacted with each other and their environment. As I’ve written before, Black took artistic license to tell the tale, but only after concentrated study. She wrote up a 56-page appendix detailing what scientists know, what is hypothetical and where she used speculation to “smooth over the gaps.”

I immediately jumped on the chance to excerpt part of the book, and we published the story of an 18-foot-long Edmontosaurus, under the title, “The Last Day of a Doomed Dinosaur.”

The story begins with a close-up on the smallest sensation on the giant creature.

Itch. The annoying impulse repeats itself over and over again through the young hadrosaur’s body. Itch itch itch, a terrible tingle between the dinosaur’s toes and along his scaly flanks.

There’s only one thing for the young Edmontosaurus to do. Sheltered by the shade of the forest, on the edge of the dinosaur’s small herd, the shovel-beaked herbivore stops to relieve the tingling burn. A beech tree will suit the situation nicely. The snarl of trunks sprouting low to the ground creates a series of great riblike scratching posts, each wrapped in sufficiently coarse bark. Tilting his thick, hefty tail backward to seesaw the front half of his body up, the dinosaur slowly steps and scrapes and rubs against the rough trunks, the friction sending momentary relief over the pebble-like scales covering his body.

And Black later describes the giant, fearsome threat to that Edmontosaurus.

For all their terrible chomping power, adult tyrannosaurs can’t move very fast. Most of the time they amble along at a slow stroll. In a rush, they can run at speeds up to fifteen miles per hour. But they don’t need to move fast. They did not evolve to chase down prey. Instead T. rex—like the other great tyrannosaurs before it—evolved to hunt by ambush, waiting until just the right moment to put the dinosaur’s leg power into one great lunge. If the tyrannosaur misses and the prey takes flight, or if the tyrannosaur is spotted before this critical moment, the hunt ends and the great carnivore moves off. And over the millions of years that tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs have coexisted, this hunting strategy has molded the attributes of Edmontosaurus. Given room to move, adult edmontosaurs can rear up on their hind legs and take off at about 28 miles per hour. That’s far from being a dinosaurian land speed record, but it’s enough. If one Edmontosaurus in a herd spots a tyrannosaur and honks in alarm, the whole herd stands upright and bolts, leaving the tyrannosaur to try to dine another day.

Eventually, Black details how the Edmontosaurus doesn’t just interact with the landscape, but shapes it.

Without the Edmontosaurus or Triceratops, much of Hell Creek would likely be forest. Young trees would compete with each other for space and sunlight, but the Cretaceous woods would grow far thicker with a greater number of saplings allowed to seek their dendrological potential. With such ever-hungry megaherbivores around, however, the grazers pluck up many of the low-lying plants and young trees before the shoots and saplings have much of a chance to become established. The Edmontosaurus herds are effectively weeding a Cretaceous garden, maintaining the open spaces that they prefer. More than that, the repeated movements of these dinosaurs create game trails and gradually depress the soil. Season by season, divots in the dirt have become puddles, which have become ponds, altering the habitats through little more than force of dinosaurian habit.

The excerpt above was just one of the stories I’ve been lucky enough to work with Black on over the years. She got her start studying ecology and evolution at Rutgers, and moved into blogging before branching out into magazine features and books. She has been fascinated with dinosaurs since she was a kid, and was drawn to cover them as an adult because of the creativity and imagination needed to write about them.

And she was pulled to cover them more during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial—about whether creationism could be offered as an alternative to evolution in science classes in public schools. Black said the fossil record and paleontology offered the strongest response to a lot of the misinformation that was being promoted by the creationism advocates, and so she wrote passionately about the science. “I just kind of followed my personal interest, and where it intersected with this public controversy,” she says. “And what started as me wanting to inform people and tell them all this amazing stuff helped generate the basis for this writing career that now, thankfully, you don't have to talk about creationism in schools quite so much anymore.”

A court eventually ruled that the proposed form of creationism, intelligent design, could not be taught in public schools in science classes.

In the time since then, Black has become a master of the paleo beat, covering everything from what CT scans of fossils reveal about now extinct animals to what we get wrong in imagining such creatures in the movies. She has written ten books in as many years, appeared on NOVA documentaries, and worked as the “resident paleontologist” for Jurassic World. The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is one of the finest examples of her storytelling skills and creativity. I called her up to see how she came up with her book idea and what experiences allowed her to pull it off so well.

So how did you get the idea to write The Last Days of the Dinosaurs?

I feel like some of our best ideas for science writing come from when we admit something that we don't know. In science news, we often focus on what's new and what's just come out. But when you see these bigger pictures emerge, you might realize that the story that you think you knew is quite different. Throughout my career, I've been writing about the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. And it seems fairly obvious—big asteroid strikes the planet, and of course it sparks a mass extinction. But the picture wasn't as simple as an asteroid strikes and then dinosaurs gradually go extinct—that kind of image I got from documentaries when I was growing up, of an emaciated T. Rex walking through ash in this world where there are no more plants. Instead, it happens as a much more violent mass extinction. That first day, you have temperatures soaring up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, sparking spontaneous forest fires, and then an impact winter. So I realized that there was a clarity to this mass extinction that we usually don't get, because the other four out of the big five mass extinctions are relatively slow changes. They took place over hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of years. They had to do with volcanic activity and oxygen levels. All these kinds of planetary processes suppressed life's evolution and ramped up the extinction rates. But in this case, everything was fine, and then an asteroid struck the planet. And the consequences of that event had never been felt before. They are incredibly extreme. And during that time of my life, I had just come out as transgender. I was just going through a divorce after being married for 13 years. It felt very much like in my personal life, I had my own Age of Dinosaurs that very suddenly had come to an end. And I was trying to kind of flourish in the aftermath. So I very much related to all these Paleocene critters, all the little birds and animals and snakes that we're trying to survive in the wake of such a dramatic change. It just felt like a story that I had to write. And I didn’t want to do a whole bunch of site visits and interviews and try to distill the science for the public. This time, I wanted to play with my dinosaurs. I’ve spent more than a decade accumulating all this information about them, and talking about it, but I wanted to bring it together in a way that felt a little bit different, a little bit special. Really trying to envision, what would it have been like to go through this? And it's something that I'm honestly quite surprised at—how people responded to the book. It was the worst kind of serendipity that a book about a global catastrophe came out during the early years of the pandemic—so many people related to that sudden change. But I think that was part of it, this idea that something can dramatically happen out of nowhere, and it changes life around you. And how does life respond to it? The next book that I'm writing now is very much in that same narrative sort of form. And I think there's a place for that, in science writing and science journalism. I wanted to try something different, and I'm glad that it's really taken off.

Yeah, it's a story not centered around scientists on a quest, but around extinct creatures. So how were you able to recreate the life of those creatures so well?

There are two prongs to how I told the story. One of which is just working the fossil beat for more than a decade—reading research, talking to experts, going to conferences, taking all this information in and then going out to field sites. And I really tried to think about what it was like when I'd actually done field work and what I was thinking about as I was wandering around looking for fossils. So there's certainly that scientific piece there that gives us a cast of characters, informs the direction of the story, and documents what actually transpired. But in terms of writing the narrative, I absolutely love movies and watching movies. I love to think about where the director is guiding our gaze. Are we focused on something that's relatively small? Are we taking a broad picture? And I really tried to bring that cinematic sense to this because I knew there's no way that I can follow the story of every single living thing. The story has to continue to move forward. There are so many organisms that I wish I could have written about or had space for—all these little tidbits that I think are fascinating—but they didn't quite fit. So for each chapter I picked one or two central characters, species that I felt like had something to say about the broader trend, something to really help establish the changes that we're going to see. In the excerpt that you published about the hadrosaur, I really wanted to take a dinosaur that you'd imagine being infested with lice. It's itchy and it's moving around grazing in this habitat, trampling down certain plants and eating other ones. They kind of shaped the forest and the chapter had this broader ecological view, which comes back around later on when we talk about the post non-avian dinosaur world. The forests are growing thick because there aren't big things trampling down the ground or pushing trees over. So I was really selecting characters in the story who are going to get us to some of these broader points.

Riley Black in the field, Courtesy of Riley Black

And at one point you wrote me that you actually took walks and borrowed some of the things you saw in nature to build up the lives of these extinct animals. Can you talk about that?

In the very first scene we're opening on the Triceratops that has recently died. And there's a Tyrannosaurus that wanders out from the woodland and opens it up. And all these little pterosaurs and birds are kind of waiting around for this to happen, because the Triceratops skin is too thick for them to access. And that's based upon something that I saw in Yellowstone National Park in Hayden Valley a couple of years before I started writing the book. I am driving along, and I see the cones put out, and rangers going around, and people starting to gather in this place. Near the road, this old [bison] bull that was living alone had passed away, and it was just sitting there. And there are all these golden eagles and ravens and other birds. They were just milling around the carcass because, other than the extremely soft parts, they couldn't get through that tough skin. So they were waiting for something else to come and open it up. And at dusk, just as we lost the light, a grizzly bear came out of the tree line from across the valley and over to the bison. When we came back to the carcass the next day, it had been opened up. The birds were enjoying the buffet. There was a grey wolf that was kind of trading back and forth with the grizzly bears to feed on this carcass. It was just such an amazing scene. I never really thought about that before, that these ecosystems are incredibly complex. You might need a large carnivore to make food accessible for other scavengers and other forms of life. So I took what I could remember from that scene and projected it. I figured the same thing probably happened in the Late Cretaceous. Where all these little birds and pterosaurs and things would love to feed on the carcasses of these big herbivores with thick, scaly skin, but they can't get into it until something like a T. rex comes and opens it up.

That’s awesome. And what do you hope readers take away from the book?

I really hope that they come away with a different view of the world. That they're able to look at the trees around them and notice that they're more likely to be flowering plants than conifers, or things like that. That's part of the legacy of this mass extinction. Or to look at the birds sitting outside the window or moving along the sidewalk, and realize that is a dinosaur, because they’re the only remaining part of the dinosaur lineage. They survived because they were able to get by on seeds and things on the ground. Or even our own existence—that without this mass extinction we wouldn't be here as our own primate ancestors survived through it. So when I write a book like this, I'm not really hoping for people to you know, memorize it, or have all the science down. What I really hope that they take away from it is the sense of connection, that over evolutionary time the relationship between evolution and extinction creates the world around us. We're still very much living with the legacy of this mass extinction. There's a history that goes back tens of millions of years that we’re very much a part of.

And can you just talk a little bit about what sort of fieldwork you do and how that informs your writing?

For the past 13 years, I've been going out with different museums and university crews, mostly around the American Southwest in the Four Corners area. But I've also done field work in Alaska and Mexico, and a couple other spots. When you go out in the field, as a paleontologist or someone who practices paleontology, you're usually doing one of two things. You're either working a quarry, a pre-established site, or you're looking for new fossil sites. You’re prospecting. I go prospecting. I hop out of the truck early in the morning and just walk and go looking. And you hope that the angle of the light, and where you're looking, and other stuff helps highlight something—a change in color or a change in shape. And when you find something, it's a lovely moment. You've found something that has been there for tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of years. I've found invertebrate tracks, fossil fish, mammal teeth, and all manner of ancient life. It's always exciting. And then you do your paperwork, you take your GPS point, you take notes about it. But it's not just the search for the fossils. You have time to think. You have time to appreciate the modern landscape and what it represents. One of my favorite moments, I was looking for marine reptiles in Nevada in Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. These are deposits that are about 220 million years old or so. And back then there was an ancient sea that covered what's now the mountains in that area of Nevada. And it's wild to be walking by wildflowers, pine trees, and juniper that are growing out of what is effectively an ancient seabed. You see ammonite shells, and maybe the bones of marine reptiles, scattered around what is now an incredibly dry, high desert. So you have the desert growing out of what was once an ocean. And I love that about fieldwork. I feel like it contributes to my mindset when I write about these places and times and organisms. That it isn't just the world in which they once lived, but we can touch it, we can touch the remnants of it, we can come up to it and see how it meets the present.

Suggested Reading:

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, by Riley Black (book)

The Last Day of a Doomed Dinosaur, Smithsonian Magazine, by Riley Black (excerpt)

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Thanks for reading,
Joe