Best of: Life Finds A Way

Quinn:

There are times when March 2020 feels like 66 million years ago. Time has always changed as we age, moving quicker as our time here have become shorter, but these past couple years have changed time for everyone. I think about time a lot. Some days I feel ancient like the grail knight at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. 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, of course. They love so many things. Swimming; cooking; plain pasta; the beach; vegetables, somehow; their friends; their family; dinosaurs, man, they love dinosaurs. And I loved dinosaurs so much as a kid and still do. Jurassic Park is top three for me. No questions asked. Before I was 10, you couldn't have convinced me there wasn't some sort of dino fossil right in the ravine behind my best friend's house. Why wouldn't there be?

Quinn:

I loved and I miss and I cherish in my kids and I try to protect that sense of wonder. At the same time, I love to challenge and help them think about how long ago it all was, how long it lasted, how different the world was, how the land under their feet here on the East Coast 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. But knowing what we know, I try to help them understand that unlike the dinosaurs, we have the tools to prevent many of these things. We have the foresight to understand when and how and why they might happen. And that's all because people keep that sense of wonder and they put it to use, asking why, why, why about now, about the future, about building incredible new things. So much of my work focuses on what's here and what's coming.

Quinn:

As much as I've also spent hundreds of hours on a broad swath of recent and ancient history, I know our increasingly complex world, these systems we've built and how they're connected to each other, how they interact. The billions of people on this planet. It all means lessons from a less complicated past can actually only go so far. And yet.

Quinn:

And yet there are occasionally these curious people who not only understand the past, but who can help translate it for us to help us understand how and why we got here, if only by the skin of our teeth, by the rotation of the earth, an angle of a particular asteroid one day 66 million years ago, who can somehow do all of these things at once, paint a picture of a timeline in which we're just a snap to connect us to that distant past and to bring it to life in such a way that we not only learn from it, but we can escape into it when today becomes too hard because as much progress as we've made in these 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, from fire to wheels, to meat, agriculture, hand washing, electricity, penicillin, combustion, refrigeration, the internet. We are in a moment when we're challenged yet again on a global scale when things are threatening to come undone because they're so connected and unlike the dinos, the present and the future of our own making. Things can happen quickly. And we need to understand how that's happened before.

Quinn:

My guest today is Riley Black. Riley is a science writer, an amateur paleontologist based in Salt Lake City, Utah. She's right in the center of dinosaur country where she chases tales of vanished lives from museum collections to remote badlands. She's a prolific writer. Riley has written for Wired and National Geographic, Slate and Scientific American. She was dubbed the science social media wizard, and one of Twitter's eight coolest geeks. She was hired as the resident paleontologist for Jurassic World, and her published books include Written in Stone; my favorite, the critically acclaimed My Beloved Brontosaurus; When Dinosaurs Ruled; Prehistoric Predators, and 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 that day 66 million years ago.

Quinn:

Riley's journey and storytelling are so 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 how we got here, to cherish the people, the places, the world around us and how lucky we are to have them. Riley Black, welcome to Important, not Important.

Riley Black:

Oh, thank you so much for having me on. I always like talking dinosaurs.

Quinn:

Truly, if someone doesn't like talking dinosaurs, I feel that's one of those... Basically it's how I judge people, essentially.

Riley Black:

I mean, yeah. I think you're right. I've run into that a couple of times where they're like, "That's cool," and they've got nothing else to say. It's like, "I don't know if we're going to get along." It's like if someone tells me they don't like cats. It's one of those, "Ooh, I don't see a way forward for this."

Quinn:

It also makes me, though, want to stop and go, "But why? Why aren't you into talking about... It's dinosaurs!" It seems crazy.

Riley Black:

Right. I get it when people say I'm into space or something else, but even then, who doesn't have a favorite dinosaur?

Quinn:

Again, I don't want to say I judge people harshly on it, but I don't have any problem saying that. So it just is what it is. Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. Like I said, huge, huge fan of your work going back, God, My Beloved Brontosaurus, what year is it? Well, now it's what? 2022. So...

Riley Black:

It was 2013. So it's almost been 10 years.

Quinn:

What happened to time, Riley?

Riley Black:

Well-

Quinn:

You seem very good writing about how fast time passes.

Riley Black:

From the perspective of deep time, none of this makes sense. The past year, I mean, we're all owed two years back, basically. So it's sort of like, okay, time is relative and we subtract two and then it's like we're here in this geological moment in time. And that's what I'm sticking with. Just, I don't need to think about it more than that for a minute.

Quinn:

I'm down with that. But you're right. We are owed a couple years here. I'll endeavor not to take too much of your time today, but I am so excited about this conversation. We start with one important question. It's a little tongue in cheek, but it sets the tone a little bit. Instead of, hey, Riley, tell us your entire life story as much as I feel that's kind of what My Beloved Brontosaurus was to an extent, at least till 2013, I like to ask why are you vital to the survival of the species?

Riley Black:

Wow. Well, I am vital to the survival of the species, I think, because of that deep time perspective, because I think it's important to have people who understand the rocks, what they mean. So when you look at something like a dinosaur skeleton, right, and you can look at it just some kind of prehistoric monster or something that gets people just into the museum to see something cool. But if you spend a minute with it, and this is what I spent my whole career talking about, and I'm hoping to share with people, a dinosaur skeleton gives you at least three fundamental truths about the universe and nature and how it works. One is that time is reality, that there have been millions and millions and billions of years involving life on earth, involving the formation of our universe, that basically that time is this really expansive thing. This wasn't just yesterday that these animals lived a long time ago and we have a relationship to that. So that's one really important thing.

Riley Black:

Another is that animals extinct, that extinction is a reality, that things can entirely disappear. 99% of all species ever existed are now extinct. That's a pretty powerful idea, but also on the flip side of that and connected to it, that evolution is reality, that life changes over time, that it isn't just that life appears and then disappears. In fact, there are these threads connecting all these things through time. So you have these three interconnected ideas about deep time, extinction, and evolution. I feel like it's important to keep reminding people of that, that it gives us perspective about where we came from, all those big questions that we have: Why am I here? Where do I come from? What is my relationship to the world around me? We can get at those things through the fossil record, or at least I think we can. I like to think of myself not so much as a science cheerleader, but as sort of emissary from deep time to try and make those connections for folks.

Quinn:

Are you Dr. Who? What do you mean, an emissary from... I mean, have you revealed things here? I love that perspective. One of my favorite stats, which I'm going to completely mangle and please immediately correct me, or just hang up whatever you'd like to do, is that again, I don't even remember which two dinos it was. It's the whole we're closer in time to T-Rex than T-Rex was to, I can't remember what it was, triceratops or something like that. That's, again, my children are young but curious and starting to ask about time and they love dinos and all that stuff. So when you tell them something like that, "What are you talking about? That seems crazy." And you're like, "No, it's real."

Riley Black:

Yeah. I think that's the sandbox view of dinosaurs, that they were all around at the same time in this age of reptiles. That's how it was presented sort of even the 19th century, early 20th century that you had an age of fishes. Granted, there were things before that. It wasn't just fish at the beginning. But in terms of life on Earth, that there is a sort of not very much going on, then in age of fishes, then in age of reptiles, and then the age of mammals and what they used to call the age of man or whatever, which I guess now is anthropocene. So we would compress the old stuff and say, "Oh, no, they're just running around. Reptiles. It doesn't really matter."

Riley Black:

But that figure that you were mentioning, that there's been 66 million years since T-Rex went extinct. But if you started at T-Rex and went backwards the other way, you would still be in the Cretaceous, really. It's over 80 million years between T-Rex and stegosaurus and brontosaurus and those sorts of dinosaurs. And that's not even going back to the first ones. So really, even though 66 million years is a very long time... And if you don't believe me, just try counting to 66 million.

Quinn:

Sure. I try to get my six-year-old to do that sometimes, primarily when he's brushing his teeth.

Riley Black:

Yeah. It'll tire you out pretty fast. But even in this time period, we're really in the shadow of the age of dinosaurs. Once you understand that aspect of time and start looking for those connections, you can still see them, that in a way we can still see things that are affected by the fact that these animals were around for so long. It really changes the way that you view the world.

Quinn:

I love that. Thank you for sharing it. When I think about that stuff, and again, I'm in this moment with my own kids where I remember so vividly being in the moment that they're in. I think that's part of the reason, even though My Beloved Brontosaurus came out, like you said, 2013, crazy, before my kids existed, it reminded me so vividly of wonder and possibility. I'm continually trying to preserve, not just encourage it in my kids, which their past that. It's taken hold of them, but preserve it because they age so quickly and because I remember it so vividly.

Quinn:

There's this quote I wrote down from My Beloved Brontosaurus that stuck with me so much because I think about marching around this ravine behind my best friend's house, 100% sure that this imprint was a tyrannosaurus footprint in 1993. Your quote was, "I nurtured my dinomania with documentaries, delighted in the dino-themed B movies I brought home from the video store and tore up my grandparents backyard in search of a perfect triceratops nest, nevermind that the classic three-horned dinosaur never roamed Central New Jersey or that the few dinosaur fossils found in the state were mostly scraps of skeletons that had been washed out to the Cretaceous Atlantic. My fossil hunter's intuition told me there had to be a dinosaur underneath the top soil. And I kept excavating my pit."

Quinn:

There's this moment in our life where that is all so real because it's all so possible. We think about that time period, even the name brontosaurus is an iconic part of that and even though it became as controversial as calling Pluto a planet, but why do you think dinosaurs have stuck with you? And why do you feel such a pull to not just engage with it, but share it with others? Like you said, you're an emissary. There's a difference between research and communications or storytelling, and you keep choosing the latter. Why?

Riley Black:

It's just something wonderful to share. It's something that I think it goes back to the childhood sense of curiosity that you mentioned. Do you remember, and I'm using this in a general sense, not you specifically, although you might have had this experience, when you'd be maybe traveling somewhere or you'd go outside to a park or something and you'd see a really cool bug or you'd see a frog or a lizard or you'd fish in a stream and it was this just fantastic moment. You're like, "Wow, that is another living thing that is very different from me, that's also on this planet," and that nature isn't something that's just out there, it's like it's here and it's around us and I'm part of it. I have a relationship to it. This is, I think, just taking that and bringing it back into the past.

Riley Black:

I still get that feeling, really. Even though my career is in communications and talking about the science and enthusiasm over, I also do the work. I go out in the field. I've written a few academic papers. I was actually just out in the field at a place called Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in Central Utah. It's this Jurassic-age place. So about 150 million years old. The main attraction is this bone bed that we've gotten at least 48 allosaurs out of. Their bones are all strewn together. It's not complete skeletons. There's likely hundreds of allosaurs in this place. But there's at least 48 of them buried here, and we're always looking for new things.

Riley Black:

The sense that I get when I get up in the morning, it's before sunrise, I'm putting my sunscreen on and packing my pack and everything else, like I feel like all the stuff that I worry about in the office, it just disappears and it just becomes like, I wonder what's over there? I want to climb that hill and see what's on top of it. It's the stuff that we not only get permission to often or encouraged to do as a kid. And we get to touch that again. I think that's what drives so much of science and stuff, that we can talk about this in terms of authority and technical language and what we know and who interprets time and what it means.

Riley Black:

But the driving force behind that, the thing that really connects all this is that sense of curiosity. it I don't think I really ever lost it. I had as a kid. I ran into a bunch of discouragement for one reason or another. I wasn't very good at math. And the idea was if you're not good at math, you can't be involved in science in ant capacity. That's fundamentally not true. But that's what I was told. I was also told that we have no dinosaurs in New Jersey. Turns out we actually did, but the idea was, well, I'd have to go to college or something eventually out West somewhere to maybe become a paleontologist some way, and that seemed too far away. But as I got frustrated by this, I said, "You know what? I want to look. I want to use this university library access that I have when I was in college to look at the actual papers in books, the things that scientists are saying, the actual information. I don't want to hear it from somebody else. I want to go to as close to the source as I can get."

Riley Black:

When I started doing that and I started learning more, I'd just wind up with more questions and I kept coming back to that idea that the questions are more important than the answers. It's just that sense of I want to know, whether it's what this animal was or what it looked, or even just, I wonder if there's fossils over there? And just holding that close, I think, has really been the core of a lot of what I do. I think it's a very human experience, whether it's dinosaurs or space or chemistry or anything, you can be entirely avocational. It's just that sense of just asking those questions and not being so fussed about what the answer is, but just feeling this, "I wonder..." It's such a powerful thing.

Quinn:

How do you feel like you keep nourishing that? Is it by going out in the field continuously and reconnecting with it?

Riley Black:

A lot of it's time spent. So I'm going to borrow something from that concept of love languages, that we all have our own ways that we like to show affection and care in our relationships. You don't have to pick just one, but I know for me a big thing is often quality time. It's spending time with someone or something that you care about. For me, whether it's going out in the field and looking for new fossils in a place where I often say, I can think my thoughts and feel my feelings, I don't have to worry about what's coming over email. I can just be present-

Quinn:

Oh, my God.

Riley Black:

-in this place and wonder about what fossils I'm going to find, what they mean, or even just going to museums. I feel like a lot of folks, they often breeze through museums. It's almost like a theme park experience. If that's what you want to do, that's great, go for it. But for me, I like to stop and sit with the skeletons a little bit and really not even look at them. I'm not glaring at them, squinting, looking for every little detail, but just be present with it. See what comes from that. What questions do I have or may yet be unanswered or things that we might not even know, possibly?

Riley Black:

But it's something where I don't know how it is for other folks. This something has to do a little bit with the fact that I am a complex PTSD survivor. I am used to going other places in my head as a place of safety. I know sometimes when I'm with folks, they notice that I go somewhere else in my head, that my expression changes or something like that. I feel like these places, these places to wonder about things and project through time, or at least come up with an image of what it was like or what this creature might have been doing, that's always been a sort of safe and affirming place for me to go to. So it's that curiosity that brings me to it and then it can be whatever it is that's in my head and it doesn't necessarily have to be the most accurate thing, the most scientific thing. The important part is that I'm coming to this with questions.

Quinn:

There's a lot of, like you're saying, devices and email and craziness, and the past couple years have been very hard on a lot of folks. How do we help more folks find safe places like this that they don't have to, like you said, necessarily go to a dig in Montana for? How do we help more people find places like this where they feel not just curiosity but comfort and safety and confidence, maybe? Do you have anything to share on that front? I just think about that all the time and how we can... I mean, we don't have the mental health support structure that we need for pre-COVID much less post-COVID. And so I just think about how we can nourish these folks, especially the young people in any way.

Riley Black:

Yeah. It certainly is something that has to do with privilege. I know I'm privileged enough to be able to go to these places and do things that most people can't do or might not have time to do because they've got to work a whole bunch. But I think a lot of this is we're having this conversation about mental health, and we're at least starting to realize that it is important. We're not just these machines where it's like, well, you should be happy. Do what you're going to do. That feels like a very sort of boomer thing from the mid to late-20th century. Your job is your identity. You can go and do it and you should be satisfied. Now, we're realizing of course that's not the case. I'm a person with needs and wants some dreams and things to do.

Riley Black:

I think part of it is finding what our escapes are. For me, I've often found that in nature. Maybe that doesn't appeal to some folks or that's not the best thing, but you can still find that, for example, in fantasy, in books, how often I feel like we escape into these other worlds, whether it's in a film or it's in a book series we pick up. I mean, one of the reasons that I wrote the Last Days of the Dinosaurs was like in a way that was my survival mechanism through the first two years of the pandemic was I would imagine what it was like in the last days of the Cretaceous and the earliest days of the Paleocene and what were these organisms doing and how were they responding, and taking time out to do that.

Riley Black:

It's difficult because time is a precious thing. We don't always have the time that we want, but I think that's just part of it is having this discussion, is saying, yes, this is an important thing to reach out and find. What works for you, what thread do you want to start pulling at a little bit and you can maybe follow that to something that's affirming and safe and having representation also matters. I think that's so much the discussion that we have in science regularly or the people and the scientists that we're seeing put forward. Do they represent where I come from or do I connect to this? It's something where sometimes I've been asked to be in documentaries and I kind of debate, should I do this or not because it might be the production company hasn't been kind to trans people in the past and am I just a diversity number to them? Or is it going to be important to some kid like me to see someone like themselves on screen and know that they can be there and there is a space?

Riley Black:

I guess this is a long way to say I don't think there's a single thing that we can necessarily do, but I think whether it's getting out into nature, losing yourself in the book, even just sitting down, shutting the phone off and really enjoying that summer blockbuster movie that you like and being able to think about pirates or superheroes or dinosaurs or whatever it is. It's those moments of basically self-care, remembering that we're not here to just simply serve everything all the time, that we need care and support as well. Sometimes we have to do it for ourselves, but I think even just having that realization can get us a long way.

Quinn:

Well, I appreciate you sharing that. My kids are still young enough, though, two years older now. I remember early in the pandemic friends who had teenagers with phones and they were really seeing news by way of that device that they truly weren't capable of processing yet because none of us really were. How much nature, which we really have on the one hand exploited and conversely lost our relationship with, of which we're sort of inextricably part of whether now or 66 billion years ago. But also, like you said, books or movies or whatever it might be, finding ways to help kids primarily, young people get away from. Look, these devices can be capable. They're enabling us to have this conversation. But it can be really hard to draw yourself away. It can be really hard to identify places that bring you solace and safety and comfort, much less curiosity and questions you want to keep pulling the string on.

Quinn:

I'm the same way. I mean, literally March 13th, 2020, I was like, "Well, I'm just reading fantasy every night, I guess from here until I don't know. Until I'm 90, I guess," because it's the only thing that was turning my brain off at night, was escaping to these worlds that were either new to me, which was so helpful in one context, but also fantasy I've been reading for years because it was comforting and I knew it and I knew within 10 minutes reading it, I was gone. I have to say your newest book made me feel that way, too, because as much as objectively horrific, almost everything dies, but at the same time, oh, my god, the way you were able to transport us to this time, which obviously you expand over the course of the book and with the detail you did was magical.

Quinn:

So anyways, I was thinking, my kids, they don't get too much screen time. Speaking of that, there's this app they've got. I don't remember who made it. I'll figure it out and I'll put in the show notes. You can zoom into the smallest thing in the universe and you can pull back out to the observable universe, the biggest thing we've got. You just realize we are this tiny little blip, whether we're talking about size or we're talking about time, like you said, the asteroid hit 66 million years ago, dinos around for 200 million collectively, something like that. We're a blip. Homo sapiens has been around 200,000 years, 300,000 years. It's nothing. Like you said, we're the shadow. We're the aftermath. We're the rebound relationship of dinos, sort of. You chose so specifically in the book mostly to seat us primarily in this one spot, to watch the world change over millions of years from Hell Creek, which was subtropical, like a nice beach for the Western Interior Seaway, like what it was, that was a storytelling choice. Why there? Why was that your mechanism to take us into what happened?

Riley Black:

So much of what we understand about the KPG extinction, about the impact and its aftermath. It comes from Western North America and it comes from this particular area of Montana and Dakota. It's also in Colorado and Utah, but where you have kind of before and after snapshots, where you have a pretty good record going up to the basically impact boundary that we can identify because it's full of debris and sort of stuff that was thrown up into the atmosphere and came back down from this impact. Then right on top of that, the fossil record just continues, so we get the next million or so years directly on top of it. So we can track, okay, who has survived? Who went extinct? Where are the sort of conditions between whereas other places on the planet, we might only have the before or we might only have the after and it becomes much more difficult to piece together that story in a sense.

Riley Black:

I try and do that a little bit at the end of each chapter. There's a little coda where it's kind of like you're elsewhere on the planet, whether it's India, back when India was an island, or in the middle of the ancient Atlantic Ocean. All these other changes that are going on that remind this is a global event and we're looking at it through this pinhole. Part of that narrative choice rather than to do the science journalist thing and say, "I'm going to talk about all these different papers and all this different research from discoveries all over the world and try and synthesize it into this little nugget at the end," I wanted to do something a little more narrative because in a sense that's what being a paleontologist and looking at deep time is. It's trying to see the world and the world over time through this little pinhole view that you really have to squeeze up close and then you're not entirely sure always what you're seeing. You can tell that something is there.

Riley Black:

This isn't all that different than a metaphor of in the 19th century, you had people Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin saying if you think of deep time as a book, it's a book that's missing a number of chapters. Even the chapters you have, you are missing parts of paragraphs and sentences and words and punctuation. You have some, and there's enough to sort of get an outline of who the characters are and how the story is going over time. But we're always missing something. So I felt like this was the richest source of information that we had, but also by saying this is the best we've got over 200 years of this discipline. We are just beginning to understand this. It's through this very narrow sort of prism into deep time. We know there are these larger consequences, but this is thinking like a paleontologist where you're not just thinking about what you directly see, you're thinking about those gaps and what those gaps mean.

Quinn:

It's so effective because my other job, which is still somewhat holding on as screenwriting, I've been doing that for seven, eight years now. The biggest thing you learn is you can have Star Wars or action movie or drama or whatever it is. It always comes back to either one of these things or both, to really be effective, which is characters, but mostly relationships and/or a sense of place. You can say the Empire's taken over the galaxy, but what is it doing to a few people and how are they surviving through it? You can show World War II and bunch of guys storming a beach. But if you just bounce around all of them or make it about a bunch of statistics, it's not going to be as moving. Same with Band of Brothers, following one company through these things, or whatever it might be, or Land Before Time. Littlefoot. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a throwback. You're welcome.

Quinn:

We focus on this one character to take us through this. I think that's what was so compelling about, like you said, you you took a little time at the end of each to bounce around and we're over in... Again, to paint the scope of it, you're very quickly we're like, and India was an island and you're just like, "What?" It's so easy to forget about that. Or if you're a child, not have known that, to understand, wait, there's so much else going on, but we become attached to it because we're in this place and we're watching this place change. It's so interesting to me that you have this ability, a page-turner, effectively, with nonfiction, to weave in little bits of fiction. You're so transparent and honest and constructive about that in the end, and your appendix is almost as long as the book, where you have to fill in gaps based on what we know and we keep finding out new things. That's how science works. But never to really change anything.

Quinn:

It reminds me a little bit of, have you ever read Erik Larson's books? Do you know that author?

Riley Black:

Yes.

Quinn:

So The Splendid and the Vile, all these things you read them and if you were to just hand them to someone, I mean the Churchill stuff more, but if you hand them the book on Devil in the White City about the World Fair and all that stuff, you just go, how could this possibly be nonfiction? How can someone make this so evocative and compelling and make you keep turning instead of just being names and dates and people? I'm selfishly interested in this not just because I enjoy your books and his books so much, because we have to quickly find ways to tell the most impactful stories about climate change, our climate change, not your asteroid's climate change or the other ones. But we can learn from those because we know history rhymes, doesn't necessarily repeat. We have to find ways to tell more powerful, evocative, moving stories about taking care of each other, about innovating, about painting a future that is both not necessarily sci-fi but an A to B jump, something we can reach for because facts aren't doing it.

Quinn:

So we continue to have these slower things like the climate crisis, which I mean, again, in deep time, not slow, but I guess for our lifetimes. We also continue to have these quicker emergencies. Like your asteroid, COVID showed up and was like, "Hey, let's test all the choices you've made so far." Didn't go great. How would you approach storytelling about our version of climate change, about public health, about a greener world and how to live in cities and how to handle land and things like that. How would you tell stories that are not necessarily fictional, but attached to characters and place that help us understand what we're capable of?

Riley Black:

Well, first I want to say, I really appreciate that you made that cinematic sort of connection. I love movies. Most nights of the week, I'm picking out a new movie to watch. Even though I've never written a screenplay; I've never shot a video, directed, I love seeing things, like when a director will focus your attention on one particular part and then pull back or there's something going on in the background that you just barely sort of perceive and then that comes to the forefront. I wrote The Last Days of the Dinosaurs very much in that mold, thinking about, I'm talking about this global event, all these different species over more than a million years of time. How do I tell this story in such a way that's going to get the reader invested and excited and want to see what happens next? And it was often about threads and relationships and interactions. Thinking about climate change specifically, I'm actually going out into the fields next month in July to a place called Uinta Basin, and out there it's about 43 million years old. So a time called the Eocene.

Quinn:

Small potatoes.

Riley Black:

Right? It seems so little compared to 66. This was a time where mammals are really proliferating and you get a lot of weirdos that are left over from the post-extinction days, things with six horns and saber teeth. But you also have the earliest rabbits and the earliest cats and dogs and the earliest camels, things like that. During this time period, it was going through a warming spike very similar to the one that we've created through human-made climate change. So basically we're trying to study this in its environment to get a preview of how is life going to respond? We know some things happen when we get these warm spikes, like insect damage on plants goes by up and that's going to be relevant for how we grow crops or things like that.

Riley Black:

But in terms of how we tell this story, I feel climate change is happening incredibly quickly, but it's still at a scale that feels so slow to us. We've talked about sea level rise and we can see it and we can talk about aridification and we can see it. And yet that's still not enough. It has to do with this idea of deficits. In science communication for a long time, I came up in the days of blogging. We'd often have debates and discussions and get into each other comments beds about this, about the best way to communicate science. And the deficit model says, "Well, people just don't have the knowledge. If we just told them this is what's happening, they would go, 'Okay, thank you scientists. Now I understand. I will vote Democratic forever,'" or whatever the outcome that we want is, but it doesn't work that way. There's so many filters that things come through, especially now as media is so fragmented that we need that emotional appeal. It goes against what you're taught in your English comp classes in high school and college or it's like-

Quinn:

journalism. Yeah.

Riley Black:

Yeah. Use those emotional appeals sparingly, carefully. That's not being objective. But I feel like that's what resonates with us. That's what we love. I mean, pop music is popular for a reason in that we relate to relationships, and science communication is no different. So I feel like if I were to approach this story, if I were to write a book about what's coming with climate change, I might actually take a similar approach to what I did with The Last Days of the Dinosaurs where I feel like if I tried to tell a story of someone in this present moment now with time ticking along as it does for us in terms of seconds and hours and days and months, that would be very difficult to do because I feel like it would be difficult to capture that sense of urgency in what's going to happen.

Riley Black:

I think what I would do would be take something a thousand years or a million years, and you'll start in the now with what we know and then take the next logical step with the predictions and then just keep taking one step further and further away from different people's perspectives and different parts of the planet. Because I think that's part of what we're often missing, is people going, like, "Well, I'm not affected. I like the warm winters or whatever it is." Meanwhile, there's somebody who can't get water and we don't know their story. So I feel like, especially since this is about humanity, it's about all of us. It's about our planet. Reminds me of the movie Contagion, where that was a relatively small group of people that we were tracking through it. It was very America-based. You can do something like that, but I think expand it geographically and temporally and start to explore it that way.

Riley Black:

How is this going to affect different people in all sorts of different backgrounds, whether that's a farmer or someone on the hill who does policy or a scientist or someone living in the suburbs or whatever it is? But I think it's forming that relationship. It's basically making that emotional appeal and finding some intersection because like you said, just saying, "Well, this is the science, so we know this is happening and it's going to be bad." Just a lot of people aren't going to hear it, but it can also easily feel defeatist, and that's even my own book The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, yeah, it's about death and grief and loss. 75% of known species disappeared virtually overnight. But it's really a story of resilience. What happens next? How does life come back from this? How does life thrive? I think we need at least some amount of hope, even if it's just hoping that hope exists because otherwise what's the point of getting out of bed in the morning? So that's the way at least I would approach it.

Quinn:

Fully get it. I've mentioned before, I'm incredibly privileged straight white guy to can afford to do this job, and yet my entrance into this doing COVID and climate and all these antibiotics, whatever, might not necessarily just bad stuff, cancer too, but we're making incredible progress on these things and the brain and whatever. There's definitely been times where my wife has find me under a blanket on the couch hiding and she's like, "Oh, no." "Listen, not a good night. Not great."

Riley Black:

Oh, I hear you. I mean, we were talking about that with phones a moment ago. It's difficult sometimes to balance being informed with taking care of yourself, especially in this past year. In my own experience, as a trans woman, there have been hundreds of transphobic bills. There are people who are running for government who are saying that people like me should be executed, and that's every day. I want to be aware of these things and know how I can make a difference, where to push back, how I can help my community, how I can help change people's minds. But if it's just basically taking in the bad news and then outputting, it's like trying to filter sludge.

Riley Black:

We do need to find those good things, those reasons for hope and connection. I think community, especially, especially when we feel the agencies that we depend on, these big government edifices or even scientific edifices are not doing enough; they're not moving fast enough. We can do very little to change what they're doing, that they don't hear us. Well, there are people around us who care and that we're connected to. I think that's a lot of what's seen humanity through so far is that build these senses of community. Yeah, when I have my own blanket over the head sort of moments, that's what I try and remember.

Quinn:

But you're right. It comes down to relationships. I guess that's one of the things that was so difficult about in the early days of the pandemic when the answer was, "All we got is stay home. That's what we got." And that's very hard because we're a social species on itself. I'm an introvert who's been training for quarantine for 10 years. But on the other hand, it removes the ability to have those relationships. Again, it's a semi-ridiculous metaphor, but being in Hell Creek, right? It's the animals that survived, the plants that survived or changed or evolved, it was because of relationships. That's what an ecosystem is. It seems to me, if we're going to tell stories about the future, the present and the future, it has to always come back to those connections of it's me and you; it's me and this nature outside of me if I'm sort of privileged to have access to it. It's me...

Quinn:

It's easy to read a headline about the oceans acidifying and you're like, "I live 700 miles from the ocean. I don't think about it." It's like, well, it affects you. But how do we tell that story? How do we make it impactful? I wonder, history, of course doesn't necessarily repeat; it rhymes. We had this wonderful conversation with the gentleman, you would love K. T. Ramesh, who is one of the early scientists behind the DART mission to try to nudge the asteroid, talked to him a couple years ago. As much as we can learn about that, I do feel we learn a lot from these retrospectives, right? Not just how we got to somewhere. Mammals were around with dinosaurs. We just didn't have a shot until they got snuffed out, but why we are. What would you say maybe are some of the more unlikely takeaways from all of your years of writing about the dinos and their last days? I guess, what was surprising to you about why things happen?

Riley Black:

I think one of the most surprising things to me was about the violence with which this change happened. I think that's partially why I related to this story. I started writing it just prior to the pandemic, but that definitely gave me, I feel like, not more motivation, but the suddenness with which everything fundamentally changed and not even really realizing the full implications of it in the beginning. I still remember that just stay inside for two weeks and how quickly two weeks turned into much more than two weeks.

Riley Black:

But in this case, I mean it was a normal day in the Cretaceous. There was no portent of this in the sense that this force was coming through our solar system for the entire time that dinosaurs were evolving, that basically during their... It's not like the asteroid was hanging out and just stopped in. It was on the edge of our solar system in the whole time when dinosaurs originate and evolve and proliferate and all the other forms of life on our planet as well. This thing was coming. And if it had been a little slower, if Earth's rotation had been a little bit different, any small thing that changed, the extinction might have been canceled or fundamentally changed. That would change. Basically that's a moment in time that maybe there's some alternate universe in which that's what occurred, but we're not in that one.

Riley Black:

It was in the first 24 hours, these animals that had been around, even if we're just talking about the dinosaurs, not everything else, that had been around for over 150 million years, all of them accept the birds, basically a decimation occurred within 24 hours. That first day was so bad. Then it was three years of impact winter and that's a very long time, but it's also an incredibly short time when you're considering all this, that in basically three years, 150 million years' worth of evolution was just scrubbed out. First line of the book, I wrote this very intentionally, "Catastrophe is never convenient." These are things that you can never prepare for. You can never expect. There's so much that relies on luck and good fortune or what you just happen to be doing at the time. That's a scary thing to think about because it means giving up this sense of control that we build around ourselves.

Riley Black:

But one of the other things was on the sort of connected to that, not entirely on the flip side, but connected to it at least. I was surprised that when it struck me that our primate ancestors, the earliest primates that existed were there during this. We often talk about this mass extinction in terms of mammals were around; they're these little insectivore things. They live in the shadow of the dinosaurs is the language we always used to use. And then the extinction happens; mammals proliferate. In broad strokes, that's true. But mammals diversified. There were Mesozoic equivalents of beavers and flying squirrels and badgers and otters and all these other things including the earliest primates that we know about, the earliest primates that we of are the same age as T-Rex. So it's not they popped up, our lineage popped up after the impact. They lived through it. We came that close to having our whole history just entirely erased, right when it started and yet they made it through, and we don't know entirely why, but they did, and it changed history fundamentally. It's this bittersweet moment.

Riley Black:

I think that's the thing that I just kept coming back to. It's difficult to find the right word to and bittersweet is the closest, at least in English, I've been able to find that we miss our dinosaurs. We miss life as it was before even if that didn't necessarily include as we are, but we miss them. We keep going back to the island, to make a little Jurassic park reference. But if they had remained, we wouldn't be here. It really is this sense of missing something that if it still existed, it would negate our own existence. It's this weird little inflection points in time.

Riley Black:

I think it's just a powerful reminder of this is time's arrow. This is history. What has happened, it can't be undone, but the moment that we're in, that's where those seeds live. That's where those little seeds of hope are. And we don't know what's going to look like 10, a 100, a 1,000, 1,000,000 years from now, but it's just all these things we can look back on and paint this picture because it's in the past. But at the time it was just moment to moment to moment. Some moments are not so great, but through all of them, there's opportunity. There's hope. There's something that can come from it. I think that's what really drew me to this story during this particular time, especially.

Quinn:

Thank you for sharing that. That's beautiful. I think about trying to wrangle this thought from catastrophe is never convenient to one of the most helpful for myself, much easier said than done to say to others when you're trying to help them over the past couple years, which is all you can do is all you can do. Which is like you said, if you can control it in the past couple years, do whatever you can. It's very hard, but you have to let go of everything else, whether you're at a T-Rex or me. I'm trying to bring that together with, like you said, this idea of we keep wanting to go back to the island. We've now done it six times in a TV show. I do it every day in my head again. It's on repeat. We miss them. But we probably wouldn't be here in this version.

Quinn:

That's easier to say than what I sometimes feel, which is if COVID was this test of all of the choices and policies and things that we've made today as a society, economy, healthcare, whatever it might be, and we failed on most of them. Horrific what happened. Most of it didn't have to happen. Most of our systems were designed this way. But I got to spend some time with my kids who were in preschool who I probably wouldn't have spent that time with. I got to teach them preschool and that's time that I probably wouldn't or couldn't have made and I wouldn't trade for anything. But what caused that is horrific and horrible. I was so privileged to be able to avoid that. My point is it's much easier for us to say. We miss the dinos. Wouldn't it be nice? "Hey, maybe we'll bring back some mammoths," and maybe we can make it work if we put them on an island versus that. But it's uncomfortable.

Quinn:

I don't really know what the point is, but it's this idea of but we're just going to continue to have these trade offs of sea level rise and fires and heat and all these things. But also what happens, like the transition of the car industry, when we make everything electric, what happens to the hundreds of thousands of people that do car repair on belts and things like that that don't exist? They're not going to have jobs anymore. The transition's going to be rough, but the cleaner world we're going to build on the other side... I don't know. I'm trying to pull this all together and I'm failing.

Riley Black:

It's something that I definitely dove into therapy with both feet and something that I deal with a lot of was grief. It's something that I feel like often we are taught, that grief should be avoided. Grief and loss should be avoided at all cost rather than this is part of life and there's going to be loss and there's going to be damage and there's going to be trauma. Sometimes it sticks. The traumas that I've been through, it's not like I don't think of those things anymore or they don't come up or I never get triggered. Now I know what to do when it happens. But that is part of the existing. It's part of the risk, I guess, of being alive. Like you said, we can find sort of beautiful things in the shade in that. So I'm going to bring this back around to the beginning. You were talking about My Beloved Brontosaurus, right?

Quinn:

Please.

Riley Black:

So I've been with my partner now for three years. The whole reason that we got together was I wrote My Beloved Brontosaurus at the time I was still married and unbeknownst to me years later, Swash, who's my girlfriend. She was in a library in Raleigh, North Carolina. She was looking for dinosaur books. She picked up Jurassic park and she picked up something else. Then she said, "You know what? That book looks interesting. I'm going to get that one," and it was My Beloved Brontosaurus. She actually put one of the other books back, not Jurassic Park, whatever the other one was. And she read it and she loved it.

Riley Black:

She looked me up, which she said she never does with authors. But she just wanted to know who wrote this? And saw that we were going to the same fandom convention. She came and we met. At the time we couldn't get together, and we were both married, pretty unhappily. But by the time the next year rolled around, we both divorced and we ended up talking about dinosaurs and then it just grew from there. Then she moved in five months before the pandemic started. We had a long-distance relationship between Salt Lake City and Raleigh. It was one of those moments, like, well, we're about to learn a whole lot about each other in a very short amount of time. Are you ready to be married for 10 years once these two years are up?

Quinn:

Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Riley Black:

If those things hadn't happened, if those happenstances hadn't occurred or we had decided not to make that move because it just wasn't the right time, whatever, I don't know what would've happened in that case. Even though it was very difficult and in a lot of ways terrible living through the pandemic and all the things, like she lost her job. I lost one of my jobs. All these things that transpired, but we still had this connection together. It was this little crucible that otherwise we might not have gotten that time. We might not be where we are now had these hadn't happened. And I'm not trying to say at all that the pandemic was a good thing or whatever, but it's finding those, that seed bank. I write literally in the book about the Cretaceous extinction, how there's the seed bank that's in the soil that's safe because it's insulated-

Quinn:

Yeah. It's incredible.

Riley Black:

-from all the heat and the fire. We have our own, personally, that you're able to look at the worst days and still see there are things growing. There's threads of good through it. I think that's always worth remembering and worth holding close.

Quinn:

It's really hard to understand how to do that even if you've been through it some days, even if you have more experience with it. One of my best friends died about... What year is it? 2020, about 12 years ago. Crazy. I immediately sort of went full office space, left my cubicle corporate job, moved in with my long distance girlfriend, now we've made three babies together. Would I have done that? I don't know. I don't know.

Quinn:

Again, not saying that him dying was a good thing. We have to find ways to mourn these things and learn from them. But I do believe it's going to be really important as we talk about in these technicalities, like adaption versus mitigation and all these things. We have to find ways to find, like you said, the things growing in the shade because we're just going to have more versions of things like this because of sort of the world we've wrought and because also that's just life. I just think your book is such a beautiful testament to that. I miss dinos every day, even though I never was with them, but it's very meaningful. I think we can learn a lot from it.

Riley Black:

I think so, too. It's something why I love seeing those threads and those connections. We talk a lot about relationships and how we interact, and then I can look outside and see a Magnolia tree. There are Magnolias that were around at the end of the Cretaceous. They're actually a survivor of that mass extinction. Or things, like if I go to the grocery store, I love putting refried beans on my burritos. Beans evolved a million years after impact as plant life came back and sort of underwrote the evolution of mammals, or the fact that birds are the only dinosaurs that we know about. But there's a little pigeon sitting on a phone line outside my window right now so the age of dinosaurs continues. A lot of it is like there's the fact of it, but that's science and that's so much of life as well. It's like there's the reality; there's the facts of things, but there's also the theory. It's what we bring to it.

Riley Black:

I think especially after these two years, yes, there's a lot that makes me upset, that makes me despair sometimes for the world. But at the same time, there are those little seeds, those little things that can grow to tell me what am I bringing to this? I can choose to say that it's hopeless and just stay where I'm at and live in that. But I would like to think that there is somewhere that we can at least try to get to. Maybe we won't, but at least want to try, that's better. Whether it was 66 million years ago or now, that sort of moment where I wish that this weren't so perfect. I wish I didn't have to keep going back to Ian Malcolm for everything. But life finds a way is one of my most favorite phrases.

Quinn:

It's so good.

Riley Black:

Yeah.

Quinn:

It's so good. Well, the past two years at times has felt like 66 million years and also like six weeks. I don't understand it. Riley, I don't want to keep you forever here. This has been wonderful. I really appreciate it.

Quinn:

I want to talk about some action steps. So as we like to say, sometimes that's very technical, some lab research or calling your Congress person, whatever it might be. Could be storytelling, philanthropy, buying books, you name it, our listeners or readers, everybody, they're very fired up about using their voice and their wallets and their personhood to show up to affect change. So anything you've got specific would be awesome.

Riley Black:

There are two recommendations I have and one of them is for anybody who's ever wondered about fossils and you want to go look for dinosaurs or anything else or make these connections, and you're not really sure where to start. Paleontology really runs on volunteers. The number of professional people who are employed as professors or collections managers is actually very, very small. There are far more volunteers.

Riley Black:

So if there is a local museum or even not a local museum, but somewhere you can get to, most have volunteer programs and most are always looking for people to help prepare fossils, to go look for them out in the field to assist in some way, basic community science. We always need more folks to do that. So if you're looking for that little piece of advice and encouragement, I'd say definitely do that, that even if you live in the most landlocked place, in a major city and you don't think there are any fossils near you, there are still ways to get out there and to do so, and that museums are often motivated. They might have grants or scholarships to help you get there if you can't get there yourself.

Quinn:

Cool.

Riley Black:

I think that's important, to continue to share this knowledge and make it good. This is a community science that we are doing this together and it's not just coming down from on high.

Riley Black:

The other is that especially now it's been really difficult seeing a lot of what many people might consider reputable news sources like the New York Times or The Guardian or the BBC or The Atlantic publish a lot of transphobic articles, a lot of misinformation that we're in the age of, "I'm just saying." And that is not what we need at all right now, especially when trans folks are so under attack, really and that we still have to deal with issues involving homelessness and suicidal ideation and all these sorts of things. The biggest thing I say is it can be difficult. We're not in our own government. We don't have one specified leader. We're often all on our own doing this.

Riley Black:

The biggest thing I'd say, on whatever social media you're on, if you're not already, follow some trans folks, especially trans folks of color and just listen to them. You don't have to respond. You don't have to comment. You don't have to argue. But just take a little while to listen to what our experience is because I think that's what helps create so much change, is empathy. It's understanding that even though if we might seem to you to be going through something that it's very difficult to relate to or it's outside your experience, I guarantee you there's so much that's shared and that we have more in common than a lot of folks think. So those are my two recommendations. Go volunteer for a museum if you can, and take a second and listen to trans folks.

Quinn:

Awesome. I love those. Obviously, folks, pick up My Beloved Brontosaurus and The Last Days of the Dinosaurs. They are just tremendous. Riley, last couple questions. They're very quick. Then we're out of here. When is the first time in your life you realized in the moment, "Hey, I've got the power of change, or me and my little crew of Goonies has the power of change or to do something meaningful"? When did that kick off for you?

Riley Black:

It's difficult to think of the first time that happened because as a writer you're often very isolated. You're creating these things and you're putting them out into the world and you don't know who's reading them. But there was a particular piece that I wrote for Sierra Magazine. It was about basically the early days of my transition and going out into the field and relating to the rock record, this idea of overburden, all this time that's over the fossils that you hope to find and wonder about, and how my life up until that point, 35 years until then, felt very much overburden.

Riley Black:

This one I put out there, I didn't think anyone was going to like it. But the responses that I got back from people saying that they understood that, that they found hope in that; they identified with it, that there were these invisible sort of connections that came from it and they felt more motivated to be themselves and meet the world in their own way. That really stuck with me about how important sometimes that little bit of vulnerability is, how it generates reciprocity. That's such an important thing to me is that I'm going to share this little bit with you and maybe you share a little bit back, and then that starts to build and do something good. So that's probably the most powerful time that I've had where I realized what I'm doing can make a difference for somebody.

Quinn:

I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Riley, who is someone in your life that has positively impacted your work in the past six months?

Riley Black:

Bethany Brookshire has been a good friend of mine for a very long time. She's also another science journalist. She used to write for Science News for Students quite a bit. Now she's freelancing. She's got a book coming out later this year called Pest. She's basically been like, if you go to the gym, you have accountability buddy or something that, she's that for my writing, where whether it's a good day, whether we've got something to celebrate or I'm just like, "I don't know how to crack this chapter. Maybe I should never have written anything at all." Basically we're walking on different paths, but we're walking together in the same direction. It's like if you're walking through a field and you've got your own trail and they've got theirs, but you're still within speaking distance and you're moving together in that direction. She has been just such a wonderful friend and just exceptionally skilled writer. I'm glad that we can kind of lean on each other when we need to.

Quinn:

That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Last one. What is a book you've read this year or in the past 66 million years that has opened your mind to a topic you hadn't considered before or has actually changed your thinking in some way? We'll throw it up on the bookshop with all the other recommendations.

Riley Black:

I'm taking a second to think about that because that's one of those things when your life is words, it's sort of like, "Okay, wait, what have I actually read?" For a second. Sometimes it's hard to find the time to do it. But one of my favorite recent books has been a book called... It's actually a therapy book, honestly. It's called Why Won't You Apologize? It's relatively short, but it's basically about, in a sense, the art of the apology and how we actually connect to people and how we actually can bring down our own defenses because so often when we've done something wrong or someone's feelings have been hurt or there's some kind of issue that needs to be resolved, we want to defend ourselves.

Riley Black:

I feel like that's so much of our social media presence as well, is if somebody takes something poorly or you make a mistake and you start to see those replies or whatever show up, and the first instinct is to circle your own wagons in a sense. This book, it really changed the way that I think about how do we approach these difficult moments, these moments of tension and how far can we apply that? Where it's not just everyday things where you hurt your girlfriend's feelings or something like that, but just even out in the world and how do we generate that sense of empathy, those moments of the greatest tension being also some of the greatest opportunities to mend and to come together. That one was definitely really important for me.

Quinn:

That's an awesome one. I will definitely check that out myself. Can always get better about that. Last one. Riley, where can our listeners follow you online should they choose?

Riley Black:

So I'm on Twitter @laelaps, which is spelled L-A-E-L-A-P-S. I also have an Instagram account that I keep meaning to do more on, and for just general news about books and things like that, rileyblack.net is my website. I also have a contact form on there if you want to reach out.

Quinn:

Awesome. I can't thank you enough for your work, for your passion for dinos and sharing it with everyone. Like we said, that's two different skills, but you marry them together wonderfully and we're all better for it. So thank you and thank you for your time today. Really appreciate it.

Riley Black:

Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. I'm hoping to get a start on the next book soon. So hopefully I'll have more reason to come back and talk about more fossil time.

Quinn:

Heck, yeah. We will always have you back. I really appreciate it, Riley.

Riley Black:

This has been great. Thank you, Quinn.

Quinn:

Thanks for listening to the show. A reminder, you can send feedback or questions about this episode or some guest recommendations to me at questions@importantnotimportant.com. Links to anything we talked about today are in your show notes in your podcast player. If you want to rep any or your shit-giver status, you can find sustainable T-shirts, hoodies, and a variety of coffee delivery vessels in our store at importantnotimportant.com/store. You can subscribe to our critically-acclaimed weekly newsletter for free at newsletter.importantnotimportant.com. Our theme music was composed by Tim Blaine. The show was edited by Anthony Luciani, and the whole episode was produced by Willow Beck. We'll see you next time.