I thought this was an interesting and entertainingly written book that told the story of our planet in a manner I haven't previously seen. That said, it needed better editing to avoid the extensive repetition (including the repeated use of the exact same adjectives and phrases). The author's style also mixes known facts and conjecture without noting which is which. While the book does include an extensive explanation at the end of the book as to what is fact and what is potentially fiction, I would have far preferred knowing which was which throughout the entire book, not just as an addendum. I'd recommend the book with those warnings. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2023/06/2023073-last-days-of-dinosaurs-asteroid.h... ( )

The editors were between a rock and a hard place. If they had taken out the extremely repetitious and boring comments on evolution, the book would have been too short to publish.

Without those lectures this had the potential to become a good book. ( )

Riley Black is a science writer of the deep past who in a number of books brings alive plants and animals that no longer exist. Her technique is to zoom in on a particular individual animal, establish it's maybe tired or hungry or seeking shade, then weave in the meat, the science facts. It does work without being too juvenile or cumbersome, it keeps you interested. The focus is on the Hell Creek Formation in Montana (Fort Peck Lake) 66 million years ago and chapters are the day of impact, the day after, 1 year after, 100 years, 1000 years etc.. One might think there would be piles of bones fossilized from this event from billions of dead animals, but there are actually very few: acid rain for years after. She reminds that the species who survived did so because of random evolutionary chance - for example turtles who can absorb oxygen through their butt were able to stay underwater long enough to avoid being cooked on the surface. Among avian dinosaurs (birds), there were two kinds - those with hard beaks for breaking open seeds, and those with toothy beaks for eating meat. The later did not survive because large animals were wiped out and there was no meat left, but the beaked birds could peck seeds from the wasteland like chickens in the desert. Totally random adaptation allowed them to survive. So our world today reflects this randomness of a single event 66 million years ago in present-day Mexico. Nobody could have guessed how things would turn out, evolution is too indeterminate, but we could say once the dinosaurs were gone it was highly unlikely they would return, the random chances that saw their rise would not repeat the same way again. ( )