The Cretaceous imagined, complete with flowers and a pterosaur MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/alamy
Extinctions
Michael J. Benton (Thames & Hudson)
“DO YOU guys ever think about dying?” blurts out Stereotypical Barbie, horrifying her friends and kicking off Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie. Maybe she had just read Michael J. Benton’s Extinctions: How life survives, adapts and evolves, an account of the worst calamities to have befallen life during the past billion or so years.
For a book that is essentially a catalogue of mass death, it is a remarkably breezy read. This isn’t surprising, given Benton has …
