Black’s style of choice is narrative non-fiction: she is resurrecting individual animals and imagining their lives. Most chapters have a short coda that looks at how life was faring elsewhere on the planet. She focuses on the Hell Creek formation in western North America as it offers one of the clearest windows into the mass extinction and its aftermath. Instead, Black’s approach is to imagine a day in the life of the survivors at various time points post-impact: after an hour, a day, a month, a year, a century, all the way up to one million years. In popular books since then, various palaeontologists have come out in favour or against the idea of an already-declining dinosaur dynasty for which the asteroid was merely a coup de grâce. Nor does she go into the ongoing debate on the relative contributions of the asteroid and Deccan Trap volcanism, which Brannen did recently in The Ends of the World. Black does not discuss the history of the research that discovered evidence of an asteroid impact, such as the iridium spike and the crater. The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World, written by Riley Black, published in Europe by The History Press in April 2022 (hardback, 287 pages)īefore delving in, a brief word on what is not in the book.
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