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Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance
by Riley Black
A gorgeously composed look at the longstanding relationship between prehistoric plants and life on Earth.
Fossils plants allow us to touch the lost worlds from billions of years of evolutionary backstory. Each petrified leaf and root show us that dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and even humans would not exist without the evolutionary efforts of their leafy counterparts. It has been the constant growth of plants that have allowed so many of our favorite, fascinating prehistoric creatures to evolve, oxygenating the atmosphere, coaxing animals onto land, and forming the forests that shaped our ancestors' anatomy. It is impossible to understand our history without them. Or, our future.
Using the same scientifically-informed narrative technique that readers loved in the award-winning The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, in When the Earth Was Green, Riley Black brings readers back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded. Each chapter stars plants and animals alike, underscoring how the interactions between species have helped shape the world we call home. As the chapters move upwards in time, Black guides readers along the burgeoning trunk of the Tree of Life, stopping to appreciate branches of an evolutionary story that links the world we know with one we can only just perceive now through the silent stone, from ancient roots to the present.
"Black excels at packaging science for lay readers, weaving illuminating natural history into sparkling descriptions of what the Earth was like millions of years ago." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Black's creative writing style and vivid descriptions, paired with well-chosen scientific facts, transport readers to verdant, sometimes violent scenes from our planet's past." —Booklist
"Black is a poet of prehistory, narrating the final moments of a gooey mosquito or the accidental, tree-bound voyage of a monkey with the detail of someone who was there and saw it all, millions of years ago...This is a book steeped with vegetal beauty, one that unfurls like a flower, blooming." —Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
"Brilliant, brimming with insight, and boundlessly entertaining. Black launches a grand tour of deep time, surveying the influence of plant life on animal evolution (and vice versa). It's a 1.2 billion-year fandango, masterfully chronicled." ―Jason Roberts, author of Every Living Thing and A Sense of the World
"An essential, extraordinary story...Black shows us how the natural world has always been a splendid, entangled scrum of interactions and transactions." ―Daniel Lewis, author of Twelve Trees, Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology, Huntington Library
This information about When the Earth Was Green was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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, and When Dinosaurs Ruled. A science correspondent for Smithsonian Magazine, Riley has become a widely-recognized expert on paleontology and has appeared on programs such as NOVA, Science Friday, and All Things Considered. When not writing about fossils, Riley joins museum crews to find new fossils across the American West.
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