The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World: The Definitive Dinosaur Encyclopedia with Stunning Illustrations, Embark on a Prehistoric Quest!

by Steve Brusatte

If you wanted to, you could walk along the Palisades for about fifty miles, from where it begins in Staten Island and extends along the Hudson to where it juts into upstate New York. Millions of people look at this cliff every week. Hundreds of thousands of people live on it. Few realize that it is a remnant of those ancient volcanic eruptions that tore apart Pangea and ushered in the Age of Dinosaurs.

The Palisades is what geologists refer to as a sill—an intrusion of magma that pokes its way in between two layers of rock far underground, but then hardens into stone before it can erupt as lava.

Birds are a type of theropod; they are rooted in that group of ferocious meat-eaters that most famously includes T. rex and Velociraptor

When it slammed into our planet, it hit with the force of over 100 trillion tons of TNT, somewhere in the vicinity of a billion nuclear bombs’ worth of energy.

There’s probably never a good time for a six-mile-wide asteroid to shoot down from the cosmos, but for dinosaurs, 66 million years ago may have been among the worst possible times—a narrow window when they were particularly exposed. If it had happened a few million years earlier or later, maybe it wouldn’t just be seagulls congregating outside my window but tyrannosaurs and sauropods too.

After all, so much about evolution—about life—comes down to fate.

The dinosaur empire may be over, but the dinosaurs remain.

If it could happen to the dinosaurs, could it also happen to us?