Plants and Animals, Evolving Together

If you’re like me then when you think about paleontology, you think about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs have an enduring place in our collective imaginations, and dinosaur fossils are great for drawing people into museums. I remember when Sue, named after it’s discoverer Sue Henderson, first came to Chicago’s Field Museum.

Sue, if you are not familiar, is one of the best-preserved sets of fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex bones ever found. Paleontologists set up work in labs on the Museum’s main floor, where visitors could watch through glass walls as they went through the painstaking work of extracting the bones from the rock they were embedded in, and had been transported to the museum still inside of. The fully assembled display resulting from their work was a huge hit when it debuted in mid-2000.

While there are plenty of dinosaurs in Riley Black’s latest book When the Earth Was Green, it’s the plants and their evolution that dominates the story she spins. Well, stories really, as the book is an episodic walk through the shared evolution of plants and animals across Earth’s history.

That sounds like an ambitious goal for a book - to tell the story of plants and animals across the whole history of the world, and it is. The remarkable thing is that Black does an admirable job of it, while still keeping to a thoroughly readable book at just over 300 pages.

It’s common now, with our modern environmentalist understanding, to speak about the interactions between the different species of plants and animals in a given environment, and the dependencies they have on one another. Coexistence Theory, as it’s called, tries to understand how competitive and cooperative traits and behaviors among various plants and animals in a given environment can result in a stable equilibrium.

But when most of us think about dinosaurs and other extinct animals like saber tooth tigers or wooly mammoths, and when we visit museums to see fossils or recreations of such animals, the animals themselves are the stars of the show, and the plants in their environment fade into the background.

Black’s book is a corrective to that. In each of her stories, spaced across time, Black shows us both the plants and the animals, and digs into how they depended on one another. The symbiosis between plants and animals in changing environments across earth’s history is the “romance” spoken of in the book’s subtitle.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. While Black doesn’t shy away from formal names for species and includes some scientific detail, she also has a great knack for storytelling that makes this book perfect for the armchair scientist inside of us. Each of her stories visits a specific time and place, starting from the earliest and moving up to almost the present day. If you have an interest in the times before humans, when all the world was green and species of animals now extinct ruled, I think you’d find this to be a great read.

RATING: Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐

RATING COMMENTS: Paleontologist and author Riley Black takes us through stories, across the history of the earth, revealing the symbiosis between plants and animals in changing environments. A thoroughly readable book.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I received an advance reviewer’s copy from NetGalley courtesy of publishers St Martin’s Press. The book will be widely available in the United States on Tuesday, February 25th.