I think about time a lot. Some days I feel ancient, some days I can’t believe how old I am.
I’ve got kids, too. I can’t believe how fast they’ve grown up already. They love so many things. Swimming. Cooking. Plain pasta. The beach. Vegetables, somehow. Their friends. Their family. Dinosaurs.
Man, oh man, do they love dinosaurs.
I love to challenge them, to help them think about how long ago it all was, and how long it lasted. How different the world was. How the land under their feet was an ocean, once.
And of course, knowing what we know now, how fast it can all change. How an asteroid - or a virus, or a fire, or a flood - can change your life forever.
I try to help them understand that, unlike the dinosaurs, we have the tools to prevent many of these things, and we have the foresight to understand when and how, and why they might happen.
As much progress as we’ve made in these 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, from fire to wheels to meat to agriculture to handwashing – we are in a moment when we are challenged yet again on a global scale, and unlike the dinos, our future is of our own making.
Things can change quickly, and we need to understand how that’s happened before.
My guest today is Riley Black.
Riley is a science writer and amateur paleontologist based in Salt Lake City, Utah, right in the center of dinosaur country, where she chases tales of vanished lives from museum collections to remote badlands.
Riley’s published books include Written in Stone, my favorite and critically-acclaimed My Beloved Brontosaurus, When Dinosaurs Ruled, Prehistoric Predators, and her newest: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, a fascinating, emotional page-turner that explores the minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, and centuries after the dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub asteroid 66 million years ago.
Riley’s journey and storytelling are powerful and so important in this moment when we’re so ready to move on to the next thing that we haven’t taken the time to cherish the people, the places, the world around us, and how lucky we are to have them.
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INI Book Club:
- Why Won't You Apologize? by Harriet Lerner
- The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black
- My Beloved Brontosaurus by Riley Black
- Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club
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- Edited by Anthony Luciani
- Produced by Willow Beck
- Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com
- Artwork by Amrit Pal