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. 

Baby Maiasaura and a parent at a mount in the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Baby Maiasaura bones and egg fragments were the first dinosaur fossils in space.

Dinosaurs In Space!

It's not just science fiction—dinosaurs have already been in space twice

Tail vertebrae from a previously known Alamosaurus specimen (A), compared with a newly-discovered Alamosaurus tail vertebra (B) and a tail vertebra from the large titanosaur Futalognkosaurus (C).

Alamosaurus Gets Pumped Up

New fossils give a body size boost to what may have been North America's largest dinosaur, Alamosaurus

An embellished "Brontosaurus" menaces the heroes of Frank Mackenzie Savile's "Beyond the Great South Wall"

Who Wrote the First Dinosaur Novel?

A decade before The Lost World debuted, one science fiction writer beat Arthur Conan Doyle to the dinosaurian punch.

A life restoration of Spinops sternbergorum

Spinops: The Long-Lost Dinosaur

Spinops was one funky looking dinosaur, and its discovery emphasizes the role of museum collections. Who knows what else is waiting to be rediscovered?

A tyrannosaur bursts from the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World'

Dinosaur Sighting: Hardcover Tyrannosaurus

The "Library Phantom" strikes again, and transforms a copy of The Lost World into a prehistoric scene

The Tyrannosaurus in Fantasia was given a nearly-accurate, tail-off-the-ground pose like this mount of Gorgosaurus at the American Museum of Natural History.

Disney’s Age of Dinosaurs

As ugly as they were, some of Fantasia's dinosaurs were ahead of their time

Bones from the foot of a hadrosaur attributed to Edmontosaurus annectens

A Detailed Guide to a Hadrosaur’s Foot

This is not super-sexy research, but some of the biggest gaps in our understanding about dinosaurs involve relatively simple things

Gorgosaurus as envisioned by Lambe. Clockwise from the upper left - standing, sitting, in repose, and feeding.

Lambe’s Lazy, Scavenging Gorgosaurus

Back when tyrannosaurs were new to science, paleontologist Lawrence Lambe cast them as bumbling scavengers that ate rotten flesh

A reconstructed skeleton of Rapetosaurus on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Inside Sauropod Armor

A hollow, thin-walled bone is not exactly the sort of structure that is going to protect a sauropod from attack—so what was its purpose?

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Has Terra Nova Delivered on the Dinosaurs?

What's the use of setting your science-fiction family drama 85 million years in the past if you're not going to highlight some of the local fauna?

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The Simpsons Sit With Dinosaurs

D'oh! Homer and the gang meet up with some scary dinosaurs

A reconstructed model of a young Tyrannosaurus at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Were these little tyrants covered in feathers?

Was Tyrannosaurus a Big Turkey?

A Microraptor catches a prehistoric bird, based on bird bones found within one Microraptor specimen.

Non-Avian Dinosaur Eats Avian Dinosaur

Paleontologists have found the bones of a bird inside a feathered dinosaur. What can this discovery tell us about how Microraptor lived?

The track of an Early Jurassic theropod dinosaur at St. George, Utah's Dinosaur Discovery Site. This track is of the same general type and close of the age of the tracks recently found near Las Vegas.

Paleontologists Track Dinosaurs Near Las Vegas

Very few skeletons have been found from this period, and much of what we know about the dinosaurs of the Early Jurassic Southwest comes from tracksites

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Telltale Games Returns to Jurassic Park

A new adventure game goes back to the scene of the crime that set the catastrophic events of the first film in motion

A reconstruction of Pampadromaeus

Pampadromaeus: Brazil’s Triassic Plains Runner

A newly discovered dinosaur from Brazil may give paleontologists a better understanding of what the ancestral dinosaur looked like

The reconstructed skull of Marshosaurus at the Natural History Museum of Utah

The Mysterious Marshosaurus

The collected remains seem to represent an approximately 18-foot-long predator in a lower weight class than the giants living in the same environment

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What Caused the Dinosaur Stampede?

According to a recent study, the cause of Australia's "Dinosaur Stampede" may have been more comedic than nightmarish

A reconstruction of Leyesaurus marayensis, showing the bones found so far. The scale bar is 25cm

Leyesaurus and the Origins of Giants

A new dinosaur found in northwestern Argentina adds more detail to the big picture of how forerunners to Jurassic giants evolved

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Montana’s “Dueling Dinosaurs”

Did a recently discovered pair of dinosaurs die at each other's throats?

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