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ISBN: 9798893030563
Publishing: June 17, 2025
Price: $16.95 US / $21.95 CAN
Paperback: 288 pages
Subject: Animals, History
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The Shortest History of Dinosaurs
The 230-Million-Year Story of Their Reign and Their World
by Riley Black
 

A highlight-reel history of culture’s favorite ancient animals—using the latest scientific discoveries to tell the epic of the dinosaurs, in brief—from the small first species that survived mass extinction during the Triassic Period, to the massive monsters of the Jurassic Period, to the fiery asteroid that ended their reign

Despite their cultural influence, the grand narrative of the dinosaur story is rarely told. Most of us have heard of Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, for example, but these two dinosaurs lived more than eighty million years apart—a greater span of time than the entire post-T. rex history of the planet. Furthermore, we often know even less about the environments these animals lived in—the other animals and plants and dramatic changes to the earth the dinosaurs inhabited.

The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs tells the full story, a 230-million-year epic of small beginnings, spectacular golden periods, and eventual global domination—before an unthinkable asteroid event brought everything to a screeching halt. Covering the major moments in evolution, extinction, and ecology, we learn that, for millions of years in the Triassic, dinosaurs were dog-sized and ordinary—but slowly developing evolutionary traits like feathers and warm-bloodedness that would set them up for future success. In the Jurassic Period, these traits—and others like laying eggs and growing specialized air sacs—led to an era of rapid growth in dinosaur population and physical size. As Pangea continued to break apart, during the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs traversed the globe, adapting to air and water—before a six-mile-wide asteroid hit Central America and brought the age of dinosaurs to a fiery end.

Using countless recent fossil discoveries, fresh understandings of genetics and evolution, and over fifty illustrations and maps, author Riley Black reveals the startling relationships dinosaurs shared with each other, the land they lived on, other animal species, and the earth as a whole.

The Shortest History Series

Riley Black is the award-winning author of more than ten books about fossils, evolution, and dinosaurs. Her latest, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, won the AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science Books, and her follow-up When the Earth Was Green will be published in 2025 by St. Martin’s Press. When not composing books, Riley regularly writes about fossils for a variety of publications such as National Geographic, Smithsonian, Slate, and more, with repeated appearances on radio and television programs such as All Things Considered, Science Friday, and NOVA. She has also acted as a science advisor on dinosaur projects for the Jurassic World franchise, and has given talks about the latest in paleontology at venues ranging from Yale University and the Houston Museum of Natural Science to the Tucson Festival of Books.