Despite their cultural influence, the grand narrative of the dinosaur story is rarely told. Most of us have heard of Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, but these two dinosaurs lived more than eighty million years apart—a greater span of time than the entire post-T. rex history of the planet. Furthermore, we often know even less about the environments these animals lived in.

The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs tells the full story, a 230-million-year epic of small beginnings, spectacular golden periods, and eventual global domination—before an unthinkable asteroid event brought everything to a screeching halt. We learn that, for millions of years in the Triassic, dinosaurs were dog-sized—but slowly developing evolutionary traits like feathers and warm-bloodedness. In the Jurassic Period, these traits—and others like laying eggs and growing specialized air sacs—led to an era of rapid growth in dinosaur population and physical size. As Pangea continued to break apart, during the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs traversed the globe, adapting to air and water—before a six-mile-wide asteroid hit Central America.

Using fossil discoveries and fresh understandings of genetics and evolution, author Riley Black reveals the startling relationships dinosaurs shared with each other, the land they lived on, other animal species, and the earth.