The last days of the dinosaurs An asteroid, extinction, and the beginning of our world
Book - 2022
"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. Life's losses were sharp and deeply-felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now. Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It's a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana 66 million years ago. A Triceratops horridus ambles along the edge of the forest. In a matter of hours, everything here will be wiped away. Lush verdure will be replaced with fire. 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. The cause of this disaster was identified decades ago. 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." --
- Subjects
- Published
-
New York :
St. Martin's Press
2022.
- Language
- English
- Main Author
- Edition
- First edition
- Physical Description
- xiii, 287 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
- Bibliography
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-287).
- ISBN
- 9781250271044
- 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
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review