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She does it in an almost nature documentary style, bringing the point of view of one creature, then another and so on (and explaining her reasons for making certain choices in the chapter notes in the end, that are almost a long as the book itself). Evolution prepared them for the world of tomorrow, and perhaps the day after, but not for this.”īlack focuses not just on the catastrophe but on the interplay between the species since the ecosystems are all about the links between the organisms. All others, from the largest Edmontosaurus to the smallest insect, perish. Only those organisms that are able to find shelter-below the ground, beneath the water-have any chance. “The battle for life on the first day of the Paleocene is won and lost by little more than biological threads. It’s both end and beginning, a period that will punctuate the Earth and create a stark dividing line between the seemingly endless Age of Reptiles and the fiery dawn of the Age of Mammals.” This is the accident that will exact an awful toll on Earth’s species, but without malice or vengeance. Out of millions of potentially deadly rocks, this is the one. It’s not going to slam into the orbiting moon, as many other rocks have, making lunar seas and craters. It’s not going to burrow into Mars and crack the Red Planet’s dry surface. It’s not going to get bumped off course by another asteroid. “This time, the great rock is going to hit. Simple as that.” Riley Black decided to give us the details - the infrared pulse, the infernal fires, the impact winter, the acid rain, and how it may have affected different dinosaur species and why. The story of how we got there is often in the minds of many summarized as such: “Often, this is about as far as the discussion goes: an immense rock smacked into the planet and myriad species were summarily snuffed out. Contorted carcasses, dappled with cracked skin, will soon dot the razed landscape.” Carpets of vegetation will be reduced to ash. “In a matter of hours, everything before us will be wiped away. The next day that world is mostly gone, the fascinating prehistoric monsters dead and the world eventually becoming the place for mammals, with only tiny feathered dinosaurs - yes, think about that next time a pigeon poops on you, and a hummingbird is an ex-dino just like a chihuahua is an ex-wolf - living on, while their mighty cousins whose skeletons are breathtaking and majestic and command our imagination remained trapped forever behind the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary.

rule the world, shaping itself their needs and creating an ecosystem in which the world of the Cretaceous era thrives.

One day enormous colossal herbivores and carnivores a.k.a. Sixty-something million years ago the world irrevocably changed. “Beginnings need endings, a lesson that we can either hold carefully or that we can deny until it finds us.”