Meet a Paleontologist: Riley Black

Riley Black knows dinosaurs. She knows them so well that while playing the part of a Stegosaurus about to be defeated by an Allosaurus during a stage play at preschool, she urged the assembled adults to consider why the Stegosaurus had a good chance of winning.

“I was supposed to lose because Stegosaurus was an herbivore and Allosaurus a carnivore,” Riley says. “But with the plates on its back and its big spiky tail, the Stegosaurus was actually a very dangerous dinosaur.”

“So, even then I wanted to share what I thought about dinosaurs and how I saw them in their prehistoric world,” she laughs.

Now a “fossil fanatic,” paleontology writer and author, Riley “interprets the past through [her] writing.” Whether she’s writing for National Geographic or Scientific American, penning her own books (My Beloved Brontosaurus, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Deep Time, and many more), or acting as the resident paleontologist for Jurassic World, Riley believes that “dinosaurs live where science and imagination meet.”

Tell us about the first time you remember being fascinated by dinosaurs.

I was about five years old and I was at the American Museum of Natural History. I remember seeing the skeleton of what we then called Brontosaurus and it still had the old head on it and its tail was dragging. I was just so amazed to be standing next to this animal that I had seen in books.

I just remember being not only blown away by how gorgeous they were, how beautiful those bones were, but wondering about what the animal was like—How it moved, what it sounded like, what it ate, what its world looked like.

I kind of got lost in a little bit of a daydream because really when you see the bones like that, or you see the fossils, it’s like a gateway to a different time period—you get to see the past.

Tell us about your journey towards becoming a paleontology writer.

In college my fascination with dinosaurs broadened out into questions about evolution, fossils, and what we know about dinosaurs beyond them being “weird monsters.” I looked up academic papers and books because I wanted to know what the scientists were saying. I would pull up papers on Google Scholar to learn how much we knew about dinosaurs, where their fossils came from, what the implications of all these discoveries were. And then I just started writing about what I was learning.

Eventually I started writing for scientific blog networks, and within about a year or so, I got a call from the Smithsonian to be their dinosaur blogger and it kind of developed into this fork in the road where I could either continue on the academic path or I could go with this writing route that just kind of unfolded through my passion for the topic.

I thought this was like a fantasy job but now I go out on digs and I've been invited by paleontologists to do field work in places like Alaska and Mexico. The fact that I got to plough my own career still stuns me. But you know, anytime I learned something new that made my eyes go wide, I wanted to tell people about it and that's really what my career has been about.

As a lover of fossils, what’s one remarkable thing about them?

If you look around at almost any living thing, there's a fossil record for it—there's a way to connect it to the past. To understand why we are here, to understand why so much of life on earth is the way it is, you have to look at fossils. You can't just look at the genes of modern organisms or their anatomy and understand the big picture. There were things we got entirely wrong before we had fossils, like the evolution of whales. And without fossils, we would have missed the fact that birds are dinosaurs.

It's kind of amazing when you think about the fact that there’s always been life on earth. Every living thing alive today has an evolutionary record that goes back to a common ancestor. So, any fossil we find—as bizarre as it might be—tells us something about that point in time. It tells us something about what the world was like, about what living organisms were doing. And it all feeds back into our story and answers questions we often wonder about, like where we came from and how life has continued to evolve over billions of years.

And it’s amazing that we even have fossils at all—that through all the different time periods, conditions were just right over and over again so that feces, footprints, and evidence of all these creatures and their lifestyles were buried and preserved, and we can find them and understand something about the ancient world.

If people could take away just one important point about paleontology, what would you want that to be?

I hope people recognize that paleontology is everybody's story. It isn’t just about a menagerie of strange, extinct animals that lived on our planet long ago. It isn't just about digging up extinct monsters and bringing them back to museums. Think of any given point in time and as distantly related as it might seem, it relates to a history we all share.

I look outside and I see all these deciduous trees and I see grass on the lawn—I see things that weren't always here, things that have their own evolutionary stories. The reason that I'm not looking at a bunch of ferns or conifers right now has to do with evolutionary events that happened in the past.

I also don’t think that dinosaurs are emblems of extinction as we often think. Dinosaurs are emblems of survival because when you think about it, they survived two mass extinctions. So, when we say “going the way of the dinosaur,” to me, that's not about extinction or being obsolete, that's about being incredibly resilient and being able to change in the midst of crises.

Wanna learn more about dinosaurs?

Visit our feature exhibition, T. rex: The Ultimate Predator presented by RBC and White Spot Restaurants. It'll take you back in time to encounter the prehistoric wonders of the late Cretaceous period and come face-to-face with a 66-million-year-old marvel!