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.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC.

I can totally picture this as a BBC documentary with a soothing voice describing each of the scenarios in this book. The way Black not only explains the relationship between plant and animal evolution over billions of years, but prescribes vivid images of what it could have been like back then, based on the fossil records we are left with today. My one gripe is that the descriptions are almost too much like a soothing narrator of a nature documentary because I was putting myself to sleep at times.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7304091768

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/8dd22b7d-3a1a-4bf7-b97d-a12365599c3d

Check out this review of When the Earth Was Green on Fable. https://fable.co/review/4c552180-ba9f-40ce-989b-e79594142f4b/share

A gorgeous book, an enriching experience. Nominally it’s the story of plant life on earth from the very very earliest beginnings to today. There’s no illustrations in the ARC that was given me by Netscape in exchange for an unbiased review. I suppose if there were, they’d mostly be black and white photos of fossils but Riley Black’s descriptions are so vibrant and lively that photos would be superfluous. One of the enchanting things about the writing is that all the critters are described as female, which makes perfect sense because who after all gives birth and does most of the nurturing? And of course the life cycle is part of the tale that is to be told in this saga of things eating and things being eaten. An extensive appendix reviews the paleontology behind this riveting story.

When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance by Riley Black is love letter to vegetation of the Earth that has driven, enhanced and allowed for the great evolutionary leaps of all life. Black's writing is engaging giving the reader a clear vision with interconnected vignettes easy for a layperson like myself to understand.

I was lucky to be able to listen to the audio first and then read the book as well. The rich appendices provide great insight to the process and methods for this amazing narrative and I encourage the users to not skip this section.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this audiobook. All opinions are my own.

“Ripped away from Earth’s botanical history, life on our planet doesn’t make the least bit of sense.”

It’s easy to relegate plants to be just the scenery, the backdrop on which something interesting - like dinosaurs, for instance - is happening. It seems that they do little but sit around being green (mostly) and being food, but life without taking into account all that botany around is not possible, at least not in the way we know it. Plants shaped our world from the air to life moving out of the oceans and onto the land, and yet through their sheer difference from easy to empathize with animal life they get the short shrift in our attention and knowledge.
“We often present plants as little more than the static background for animal behavior—grasslands are sustenance and setting for gazelle, rafts of duckweed conceal lurking alligators, and tigers need forests of the night to burn so brightly in. Even within the confines of our own experience, plants are often part of an inert-seeming landscape until they have some direct effect on our day-to-day lives.”
———
“Our ignorance certainly colors what we understand of life’s ever-expanding evolutionary panorama. Palms and conifers might frame a prehistoric scene where bizarre reptiles snarl at each other, but we tend not to ask about the lives that make up the habitats in which our favorite prehistoric creatures roamed. Such scenes are absolutely bursting with life, but it’s challenging for us to think beyond the experiences of the toothy and reptilian.”

I adored Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World, and I was very curious what she does here with the greenery as her subject. To be fair, she doesn’t focus just on the plants but rather on the interconnected coexistence between plants and animals, looking at how plants and animals co-shaped their mutual evolution through interactions with each other.

The book is structured as a dozen-plus vignettes from different periods of prehistory, from 1.2 billion years ago to 15,000 years in the past, starting among the first photosynthesizers who also discovered sexual reproduction, through time periods where we get plants migrating on land, first forests and increase in oxygen in the atmosphere leading to some gigantic insects, to colossal herbivores consuming unbelievable amounts of plants to fuel their insane growth and the adaptations herbivores had to come up with, to appearance of angiosperms, pollination, emergence of rainforests following the evolutionary niches left bare by the dinosaur-killing asteroid, grasslands, catnip (seriously!), the autumn adaptation of leaves changing color and falling off.

“The further we get from our own evolutionary neighborhood, the harder it is for us to connect or understand all the different ways there are to be alive. Plants are the aliens that live in the yard. They grow according to timescales that are often imperceptible to us, release the most essential element in the air we breathe as a waste product, cast their sex cells to the wind, and communicate with each other in ways we’ve only just barely begun to perceive. The great trick of the plants is that they are so ubiquitous, so essential for our own lives, that we’ve ceased to be impressed by their lives and how ours intersect with them.”

It’s a bit meandering and has way more animal life than I thought I’d find after reading the introduction — but I suppose it’s not a book on plants but rather on interconnectedness between plant and animal life. It may be a bit disjointed and by the end of the chapter I would sometimes forget why and how we got there — but yet it’s fun and written so enthusiastically, with a little bit of humor. Black is very descriptive and makes her prehistoric landscapes very vivid, sometimes even flowery (to risk a bad plants-related pun), which sometimes got a bit tiring but luckily not overly so. Of course she admits to some guesswork and assumptions, but without those it’s pretty much impossible to imagine the past with the limitations of our fossil records. She addresses these in the appendices to each chapter, and I found those notes almost more interesting than the chapters themselves, and I think I would have preferred for each appendix to follow the chapter directly rather than all them clustered at the end.

It didn’t pull me in as much as Riley Black’s prior book on dinosaurs, but I still had a good time reading it. 3.5 stars, and I’m looking forward to more of her work.

——————

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Riley Black was the resident palaeontologist for the Jurassic World franchise, so they really know how to weave a dinosaur tale. In this, their most recent book which releases February 25, they take us on a deep dive into paleo botany, or the study of ancient plants. Sounds boring, but I assure you it isn’t. Not the way Black tells it. The whole book feels like one National Geographic episode after another, and you can almost imagine Morgan Freeman or David Attenborough narrating (though Wren Mack does a very good job.)

I listened to this one on audio and enjoyed how this amplified the story-telling, documentary feel of this book. But my favourite parts were the intro and conclusion, when Black gets personal about how their passion for palaeontology has shaped their understanding of their own lives.

Thanks to @macmillan.audio and @netgalley for a complimentary copy of this audiobook to review. All thoughts are my own.

„The great trick of the plants is that they are so ubiquitous, so essential for our own lives, that we’ve ceased to be impressed by their lives and how ours intersect with them,” writes Riley Black in the introduction to her new book. In the subsequent chapters, she provides many examples of why we should admire prehistoric plants as much as the dinosaurs to which she devoted her earlier work. In colorful prose, she recreates ancient landscapes and shows how flora and fauna shaped each other over eons.

Recommended for anyone interested in paleontology and evolutionary biology.

Thanks to the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

Thank you St. Martin's Press for this arc.

The prologue is beautifully written and sets up what we're going to have presented to us and why it matters. The prologue also goes on, and on, and on. Seriously, how long is a prologue supposed to be? I was itching for the book to start way before it did.


Not gonna lie the first chapter was, at times, a slog to get through. Black writes beautifully and poetically but her sentences can go on long enough to steep tea by.


There is also a fair amount, at least early on, of descriptions of something - plant or animal - along with little tidbits about how this plant or animal would eventually evolve into this one 50 million years later and be changed in that way. Until I got used to this, I felt as if my attention was being yanked back and forth and I was in danger of losing the plot. It shows Black's extensive knowledge and research though. I can only imagine what reams of stuff she left out.


Much as the fossil record skips a lot, this is not a seamless flow across all the time between when plants and animals began and now. Black has selected important moments when things occurred that caused major shifts in how plants and animals evolved, the first being the above mentioned huge increase in the oxygen level. The chapters show how things were changing and how plants and animals changed each other in either a dance or an arms race.


We are talking about things that, in some cases, took place millions or billions of years ago. Knowledge has to be gleaned from what got preserved as fossils and then found, as well as how much of the fossil has been found. Some finessing and extrapolation is done but, yes!, Black adds appendixes at the end in which she discusses why she makes the choices she does and how these are based on scientific knowledge we have. She also admits that with further discoveries, some of this will need to be amended. It's also a book that cries out for some illustrations. But plants, which deserve their attention as much as megafauna, are finally and firmly brought front and center. B

Finished Reading

Pre-Read notes

I adore natural history. Nothing makes me happier than learning something I didn't before about the imprint of life on Earth. This book, about prehistoric vegetation, seemed like the perfect choice for my interests! The first few pages already excite me!

Final Review

The tree that moves some to tears of joy is to others a green thing that stands in the way. —WILLIAM BLAKE p5

Review summary and recommendations

I loved the subject of this book and I learned so much about how plants support life, through the ages. I relished in Black's descriptions of different Earths of epochs past. Though I wanted more science, a deeper look at the species of interest, I had a lot of fun reading this.

I recommend this book to readers who love popular science, dinosaurs, or discussions of prehistoric Earth. A book that turned my very adult self into a kid for a couple of daya!

Genetics alone are useless. DNA only makes sense in the context of its environment, an interplay between what genes can tell a body to do and whether that body is having its requirements met. p62

Reading Notes

Six things I loved:

1. What I mean by “when the Earth was green” is not some irretrievable past or a denial that, despite our efforts, there is a great deal of green around us today, but thinking of key moments that plants have changed the nature of nature itself just as we tend to pay special attention to the great springtime blooms when the first leaves unfurled all around us are so impossibly, vibrantly verdant that I can’t help but smile when I notice the hills around my home burst with color. p17 This gorgeous passage both displays Black's writing prowess and also defines the author's purpose for her text.

2. In a rapidly changing world, sex is one way to stay ahead of tomorrow’s changes. p27 When sex isn't sexy it's survival.

3. [T]he chromosomes split again into two parts to send out into the environment as spores. The plants don’t have control over where those spores land. If too many egg-producing plants land near each other, they might not get fertilized. If the spores land in dried-out patches of the beach, the liverworts won’t grow there. The fate of the spores depends almost entirely on wind and water, sand and sun, which then grow just to add more chance into the process. p35 It's wild to think about how much life depends on luck.

4. The story about the monkeys on the raft is one of the best things I've ever heard!

5. Plants can be surprisingly sensitive organisms. They’ve had to be. For a tree like the hackberry , rooted in one place for the entire duration of its life, there’s no way to physically evade hungry herbivores or forcefully shoo them away. In such circumstances, plants have had to evolve ways to both detect danger and, if not drive the attackers off, quickly repair the damage done from so many hungry mouths. p109 Plants are amazing. I love the approach Black chose, to discuss the plants and animals that have always interacted, needed each other, depended on each other.

6. How can I not love a lengthy description of ancient saber-tooth cats enjoying a wild patch of fresh catnip!?

One thing I didn't love:

This section isn't only for criticisms. It's merely for items that I felt something for other than "love" or some interpretation thereof.

1. It doesn't affect readability, or at least hasn't yet, but this author writes some very long sentences. They are well-built, just phrase-heavy.

Rating: 🦣🦤🐊🦕 /5 prehistoric critters
Recommend? yes!
Finished: Feb 3 '25
Format: digital arc, NetGalley; accessible digital, Libby
Read this book if you like:
⚗️ popular science
🧬 biology
🦕 dinosaurs
🌱 plants
🦠 natural history

Thank you to the author Riley Black, publishers St. Martin's Press, and NetGalley for an advance digital copy of WHEN THE EARTH WAS GREEN. I found an accessible digital copy on Libby. All views are mine.
---------------

Basically this book is an enthusiastic prance through a very long span of time. Each chapter makes you pause in adifferent evolutionary period to experience what life was like. I enjoyed the scenarios populated with vividly described plants, animals and insights. The interweaving of creatures through time gives the reader breathtaking glimpses of evolution.. I was surprised that the fifteen chapters ended rather abruptly without a modern age glimpse until the extra pages. Those extra pages included long footnotes to each chapter, each essay worth the read. I especially enjoyed the visit to the quaking aspen grove. that ceentered the author in the book. Overall, its a good book, well worth browsing. A major loss, for me, was the absence of pictures, graphics, or illustrations of any kind. They would have helped brng those ancient beings and environments to life.

This book has a lot of information in it! I found it really interesting to learn about evolution with a focus on plants. However, I found the writing to be dense and uneven. There were sections that felt rushed and others I wanted more information on. As the author says in the introduction each chapter is a mix of science and speculation with an appendix at the end of the book, clarifying which is which. Maybe on a paper book this would have been easier to deal with, but with an ebook, it's frustrating. Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy in return for my honest opinion.

This is, without a doubt, the most readable and enjoyable natural history work I have read. Written with a novelists eye for narrative, plot, conflict, and intrigue, When The Hearth Was Green drew me in and held me throughout as traveled back to the beginning of the emergence of plants. I was grateful for the short chapters that allowed me to easily manage the amount of information that I was learning without feeling overwhelmed or intimated by Riley Blacked impressive knowledge. This was a book that actively engaged me by seeing connections between things that are of often taught as distinctly separate stories.

The only drawback to this book, and this may be because I read a galley proof, was the lack of visuals. Black's writing although engaging and vivid still needed the support of diagrams and photos.

4.25⭐️

Who knew a book about the Earth’s history could be so humorous and beautiful at the same time? I am obsessed with the way Riley Black chose to craft this story of our planet’s history and showcase the connectivity between all things inhabiting the earth, both plants and creatures big and small.

I adore how Black shifted the narrative that is so often told of the terrific, hulking dinosaurs of the past to the fauna and flora that are often forgotten and depicted as simple scenery when we peer into what use to be. This book truly show “you are what you eat”, and our environments play a massive role in shaping us -

“It’s not a matter of life on Earth so much as life enmeshed with Earth, and plants have taken an ever-greater role in shaping the planet’s history.”

There are endless quotes throughout the book where Black so eloquently illustrated this long ago composition of our planet -

“What seemed so straightforward, even elegant, is beginning to erupt in a cacophony of evolution and extinction, a ceaseless tune in which new players will imperceptibly, fundamentally change the melody with each passing moment.”

What surprised me most about this work was the beautiful conclusion Black included at the end of the book. I never would have expected a text about our prehistoric planet to bring tears to my eyes, but this one absolutely did. Thank you, Riley, for your vulnerability and sharing this beautiful story.

This beautiful quote from the conclusion -

“The world we meet today is the foundation for tomorrow. If we are the plants, then our ideas and actions are the seeds and spores. We might not live to see them grow or even flower as we have. Nevertheless, the variety we embody and bring to the world forms a base from which new communities will grow and respond to the shifting world around them.”

- left me in awe of the way Black articulated how our unique traits and differences help to shape the abundantly beautiful world we are lucky enough to inhabit, and left me to consider what seeds and spores I am sowing and sharing in my daily life.

My two wants that lowered this book’s rating from a 5⭐️ to 4.25⭐️ are selfish:
1. I would have loved illustrations to coincide with all the plant and animal life we encountered throughout the book. I found myself wanting to pause my reading to look up various things but also not wanting to set the book down to do so.
2. I was literally shocked when I read the header “Conclusion” on the last chapter of the book - I was so immersed in Black’s writing and retelling of Earth’s history and I just wanted MORE! I could have read several hundred more pages about Earth and her diverse life, and I was jarred to find I had reached the end of what the book had to offer.

Overall, a lovely read that I would revisit again.

If you’ve ever wanted a beautifully written, science-packed love letter to the history of life on Earth, this book is exactly that—and it’s fascinating.

Riley Black takes us on a lush, vivid journey through evolution, showing how plants and animals have been entangled in an epic romance for millions of years. It’s part science, part storytelling, and 100% the kind of book that makes you see the natural world differently.

TL;DR: If you love science writing that’s engaging, poetic, and just a little bit mind-blowing, When the Earth Was Green is a must-read. Perfect for nature lovers, science geeks, and anyone who’s ever been amazed by the sheer magic of life on this planet.

If you’re even remotely curious about the world around us and the plants that have shaped it, When the Earth Was Green is an absolute must-read. This book is like a time machine that takes you on a journey from ancient seas to vast forests, revealing just how much our world—past, present, and future—has been influenced by the incredible plants that have existed for billions of years.

Riley Black does something magical here. She not only brings prehistoric plants to life, but she also connects them to the creatures that evolved alongside them, showing the intricate relationship between the two. Imagine dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and even humans, all riding the coattails of the leafy world around them. It’s wild to think about how plants have literally shaped the oxygen we breathe, coaxed animals onto land, and even influenced our very anatomy. We owe so much of our existence to them, and Black does a masterful job of showing us just how interconnected life really is.

The best part? Black’s storytelling. She brings the science to life in a way that’s not only accessible but compelling. It’s one thing to read about plant evolution, but it’s another to feel like you’re walking through ancient swamps and forests, witnessing pivotal moments in our planet’s history. Every chapter reads like a little snapshot of a world that existed eons ago, and you’ll find yourself utterly captivated by how plants played a part in shaping the evolution of life itself.

This book isn’t just for the science buffs, either—it’s for anyone who has ever wondered about the origins of life on Earth or how the natural world has evolved. Black’s scientifically-informed yet narrative-driven approach makes complex ideas easy to understand and even easier to appreciate. The way she weaves together plants, animals, and the history of life on Earth feels like reading the most thrilling, mind-expanding story of all time.

Most of us think of plants as background or scenery in the story of life on earth. How did plants interact with and affect other life on our planet from dinosaurs to early humans. Written with scientific accuracy but a storyteller’s art.

This is a book written with similar style as a novel, but it is nonfiction. This is a book on evolution, covering billions of years, describing the stages of life beautifully. For each stage, you get a phenomenal sense of place. You can certainly see it in your mind. I love reading before bed and the author created a dream-like read for me.
Four stars only because of the scientific terminology tossed here in there that I don’t know. It is distracting to have to stop and look something up. Then again, new words!

Thank you to Riley Black, NetGalley, and St. Martin's Press for allowing me to read a free ebook in exchange for my honest opinion.

When the Earth Was Green is divided into fifteen vignettes at important moments in prehistory of which we have a glimpse given to us by the fossil record. These vignettes are presented in chronological order, beginning with the first proto-plant which had single celled organisms living cooperatively, with different cells performing different functions. Each chapter celebrates a different important point in the advancement of plants, specifically focusing on both how the world formed the plants and how the plants in turn affected the world around them. I had previously never thought deeply about how plants had driven animal evolution other than the obvious examples of plant pollen/nectar and animal pollinator. There are many other ways in which plants affect the environment surrounding all other life such as atmospheric gas content, available energy for insects and herbivores to eat, roots to hold earth against erosion, food source for fungi, camouflage for both the predator and the prey, flammable material available to ignite from lightning strikes, etc.

This was a very well written book of popular science that one can become lost in because the story is told so well! Highly recommend!

I was first surprised, then very pleased at the unexpected content of the conclusion (no spoilers here; you have to read it for yourself!) and the parallels that the author draws between her personal experiences and an attempt to understand the experience of a plant. Loved it!

I really enjoyed the structure of this book. Each chapter is set in a different epoch and focuses on a different animal and the plants that were in their environment. Each chapter explained how plants and animals pushed each other to adapt. The writing was well done as well. I will definitely be picking up their previous book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, and any future books they write. Fun note--I recognized the author from a science documentary I watched a while back.

This book explores the crucial role of prehistoric plants in shaping life on Earth. Fossil records reveal how plants paved the way for animal evolution, from dinosaurs to humans. Using a narrative approach, the book journeys through prehistoric landscapes, highlighting key moments in plant evolution and their impact on the world we know today.

Beautifully written, this captivating book provides an excellent overview of how plant life developed and thrived on Earth. I loved the audio narration. It’s a book worth reading and savoring a second time.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.