The Last Days Of The Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, And The Beginning Of Our World, by Brian “Riley” Black

Most of this book is perfectly fine. It is not surprising that this is the sort of book that it is easy to overpraise, in that the author seeks to make this book a sort of nonfiction novel. Given that this sort of book is prone to being full of all kinds of deceptions, it is perhaps unsurprising that this book would have a blend of fantasy and reality, and that the author would feel free in openly transgressing the boundaries of genre. It is only at the end when what is previously mostly a sermonizing work that is a bit too strident about certain views of evolution, namely in seeking to counter the common view that it is open niches which spurn creativity, while in the author’s perspective it is diversity that spawns more diversity (as if that was a good thing), even if it is generalists that tend to survive problems the best because of their greater flexibility. In a fundamental sense, this book has the wrong title, in that it claims to be about the last days of dinosaurs when it spends most of its time and attention as to the first days without the dinosaurs, even if that is a less saleable title and a more difficult one to relate to.

The core of this book is less than 200 pages of generally solid material, but the book is let down at the end. The book begins with a preface and geologic timeline before a somewhat lengthy introduction sets the stage for the main contents. This is followed by a chapter that examines the life of dinosaurs at Hell Creek just before the impact of the K-T asteroid (1). This is followed by a discussion of the impact and its immediate results (2). After that there is a discussion of what happened within the first hour of the impact (3), and then the fires which raged the first day around the impact all around the world, apparently (4). This is followed by a discussion of those animals which managed to hang around into the chill that took place within the first month of impact (5). This is followed by a discussion of the survivors one year after impact (6), some of which were still doomed to soon disappear. The next chapter narrates a supposed vision of earth one hundred years after impact (7), when early survivors are making themselves felt in a fragile environment. There is then a skip to the new “old growth” environment one thousand years after impact in a world still dominated, it seems, by ferns and flowering plants (8). This is followed by chapters which discuss the rise of mammals one hundred thousand years (9) and then one million (10) years after impact, where mammals and birds are making themselves felt in a variety of ways. At this point the author tacks on an unnecessary conclusion as well as a lengthy appendix that seeks to parse the difference between fact and fantasy in the narrative, before closing with acknowledgments and notes.

This book, sadly, is evidence of why we cannot have many good things when it comes to books in this contemporary age. The target reader of this book wants to read about dinosaurs, and most of the dinosaurs die off pretty quickly here, replaced by early mammals that the author speculates about as well as birds and other survivors of the catastrophe. There are even some Ammonites who make an appearance as the author speculates about their demise due to the acidification of waters that are taking in carbon dioxide, possibly in order to stay relevant when talking about historical climate change. All of that is well and good, and had the book stuck to the K-T transition it would have been a very good book. Unfortunately, the author finds it necessary at the end of the book to talk about how his troubled personal life makes him better able to understand dinosaurs, and seems to indicate some mental health issues when it comes to the process of writing the book. Although this book is a relatively short one, it would have been far better to not discuss the present day at all, and to have not discussed the author at all either. It is such a shame that this cuts so much against the modern tendency for writers to make themselves the center of their story and to make their cultural and political attitude the lynchpin of their attempts to gain credibility. Unfortunately, in this book, as is often the case, the author is the last sympathetic part of his book, and his attempts to reveal himself do not endear him to the reader who seeks in books the escape from contemporary decadence and moral pollution and corruption.