Riley Black

Riley Black

 

Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and many other books. She is a science correspondent for Smithsonian magazine covering fossils and natural history, and she writes about the prehistoric past for a variety of publications. 

Did sexual selection cause sauropods, such as this Barosaurus at the Natural History Museum of Utah, to evolve ludicrously long necks?

Sex and Dinosaur Necks

Did competition for mates drive the evolution of the enormous, long-necked sauropods?

The backside of Diplodocus, photographed at the Utah Field House of Natural History

How Did the Biggest Dinosaurs Get it On?

Of all the dinosaur mysteries, how dinosaurs like the 23-ton Apatosaurus mated is one of the most perplexing

A restoration of Hypselosaurus, a sauropod dinosaur which may have laid some of the eggs found in Cretaceous rock of Southern France.

Who Was the First to Discover Dinosaur Eggs?

Despite an immense wave of publicity heralding the discovery of dinosaur eggs in 1923, French paleontologists had discovered them decades earlier

A restoration of Saurolophus angustirostris based upon skeletal and soft-tissue fossils

Judging a Dinosaur By its Cover

A new study suggests that you can distinguish different hadrosaur species by their pebbly hides alone

None

Dinosaur Deep Freeze

An animated short suggests dinosaurs died out for want of winter coats

A reconstruction of Velociraptor, complete with a scleral ring in the eye, at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, WY.

The Debate Over Dinosaur Sight

Did Velociraptor hunt under the cover of darkness?

A restoration of the Cretaceous snake Sanajeh about to gulp down a baby sauropod.

Scrambled Eggs and the Demise of the Dinosaurs

Did egg-eating lizards and snakes contribute to the dinosaurs' extinction?

A restoration of the island hadrosauroid Tethyshadros by Nobu Tamura

The “Duck-billed” Dinosaur That Wasn’t

Instead of a long, low duck bill, the beak of Tethyshadros was shaped like a snowplow and serrated. Why it had such a strange beak is a mystery

A reconstruction of Tyrannosaurus rex on display at the National Museum of Natural History.

T. rex Trying…

A new cartoon series counts the many things tiny-armed Tyrannosaurus couldn't do: cross-country ski, eat from a buffet, count to five

None

How an Ankylosaur Went Out to Sea

How did a heavily armored dinosaur wind up at the bottom of Alberta's Cretaceous sea?

Best of the Worst Roadside Dinosaurs

From New York to California, America's roads are haunted by bad dinosaurs

None

Stephen Fry Inside the World of Dinosaurs

British actor Stephen Fry narrates a new interactive dinosaur encyclopedia

A parent Massospondylus attends to its hatchlings

Paleontologists Uncover Oldest Known Dinosaur Nest Site

The "lay 'em and leave 'em" strategy might not have been the ancestral state for these dinosaurs

The reconstructed shoulder and arm of Majungasaurus

Fearsome Dinosaur Had Ridiculously Short Arms

The forelimbs of this animal look like an evolutionary joke

A clutch of sauropod eggs at the geothermal nesting site in Argentina. Eggs are outlined by black dashes.

Some Dinosaurs Used Natural Heat for Their Nests

The sauropod site may have resembled Yellowstone National Park, with geysers, hot springs and mud pots

One of the sad dinosaurs at Stewart's Petrified Wood near Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

What Are the Worst Roadside Dinosaurs?

The concrete and plastic dinosaurs beside America's highways are often sad, malformed creatures. What do you think is the best of the worst?

Ceratosaurus nasicornis at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

The Largest Ceratosaurus

How many species of this rare, ornamented genus were there?

None

Inside Dr. Who’s Dinosaur Invasion

Dr. Who sported some of the worst dinosaurs on television. This video explains why

The hips of the ornithischian dinosaur Stegosaurus (left) and the saurischian dinosaur Allosaurus (right)

Dinosaur Division is All in the Hips

Thanks to one 1888 paper, paleontologists still divide dinosaurs between the bird-hips and lizard-hips

A specimen of the non-avian dinosaur Sinosauropteryx, showing the ruff of simple protofeathers along the back and tail.

Dinosaurs of a Feather

Some researchers insist that birds are not dinosaurs, but do they have any evidence?

Page 21 of 59