: Riley Black
: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs An Asteroid, Extinction and the Beginning of Our World
: The History Press
: 9781803990729
: 1
: CHF 12.60
:
: Natur: Allgemeines, Nachschlagewerke
: English
: 304
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Some 66 million years 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 vanish seemingly overnight. But this worst single day in the history of life of 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. 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. 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.

RILEY BLACK has been heralded as 'one of our premier gifted young science writers' and is the critically acclaimed author of Skeleton Keys, My Beloved Brontosaurus, Written in Stone, When Dinosaurs Ruled and Deep Time. Her work has appeared in Science, The New York Times, Nature, Smithsonian and more. Black also has a strong online presence, connecting with over 27,000 followers on Twitter, and has written on nerdy pop culture for websites like Slate, io9 and The Guardian. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Introduction


Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It’s a day like most any other, a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana about 66 million years ago. The ground is a bit mushy, a fetid muck saturated from recent rains that caused a nearby floodplain stream to overrun its banks. If you didn’t know any better, you might think you were wading on the edge of a Gulf Coast swamp on a midsummer day. Magnolias and dogwoods shoulder their way into stands of conifers, ferns, and other low-lying plants gently waving in the light breeze drifting over the open ground you now stand upon. But a familiar face soon reminds you that this is a different time.

ATriceratops horridus ambles along the edge of the forest, three-foot-long brow horns slightly swaying to and fro as the pudgy dinosaur shuffles its scaly, ten-ton bulk over the damp earth. The dinosaur is a massive quadruped, seemingly a big, tough-skinned platform meant to support a massive head decorated with a shield-like frill jutting from the back of the skull, a long horn over each eye, a short nose horn, and a parrot-like beak great for snipping vegetation that is ground to messy pulp by the plant-eater’s cheek teeth. The massive herbivore snorts, making some unseen mammal chitter and scramble in alarm somewhere in the shaded depths of the woods. At this time of the day, with the sun still high and temperatures above 80 degrees, there’s barely another dinosaur in sight—the only other “terrible lizards” plainly in view are a couple of birds perched on a gnarled branch peeking out from just inside the shadow of the forest. The avians seem to grin, their tiny insect-snatching teeth jutting from their beaks.

This is where we’ll watch the Age of Dinosaurs come crashing to a fiery close.

In a matter of hours, everything before us will be wiped away. Lush verdure will be replaced with fire. Sunny skies will grow dark with soot. Carpets of vegetation will be reduced to ash. Contorted carcasses, dappled with cracked skin, will soon dot the razed landscape.Tyrannosaurus rex—the tyrant king—will be toppled from their throne, along with every other species of non-avian dinosaur no matter their size, diet, or disposition. After more than 150 million years of shaping the world’s ecosystems and diversifying into an unparalleled saurian menagerie, the terrible lizards will come within a feather’s breadth of total annihilation.

We know the birds survive, and even thrive, in the aftermath of what’s to come. A small flock of avian species will carry on their family’s banner, perched to begin a new chapter of the dinosaurian story that will unfold through tens of millions of years to our modern era. But our favorite dinosaurs in all their toothy, spiked, horned, and clawed glory will vanish in the blink of an eye, leaving behind scraps of skin, feather, and bone that we’ll unearth eons later as the only clues to let us know that such fantastic reptiles ever existed. Through such unlikely and delicate preservation our favorite dinosaurs will become creatures that defy tense—their remains still with us, but stripped of their vitality, simultaneously existing in the present and the past.

The non-avian dinosaurs won’t be the