Riley Black on Dinosaurs and Queerness
Assigned media interviews author and paleontologist Riley Black.
Riley Black is an award-winning science writer, an author of several books, and a trans woman who has been outspoken about her queerness since coming out in 2019. She spoke with Assigned Media about paleontology, extinction, and being the one trans person everybody knows.
Assigned Media: You're best known for your writing about dinosaurs, which has been all over the place going back to the golden age of blogs. But your new book, When the Earth Was Green, is about… plants.
Did you run out of dinosaurs, or what?
Riley Black: There are always more dinosaurs. One of the documentaries I loved as a kid was literally called more dinosaurs, and more dinosaurs kind of became my career.
After I wrote The Last Days of the Dinosaurs I noticed people would really focus on my fern chapter and what was going on with the plants. They didn't know there was a mass extinction of plants 66 million years ago along with T-Rex and triceratops.
That extinction is the reason that we have so many flowering plants today, as opposed to conifers and ferns. The very first rainforests also popped up about a million years or so after that.
I don't know whether it was because of the indoor years of the pandemic, where people got very affectionate towards their houseplants, but I kept hearing people say, honestly, I'm interested more in plants than I am in animals. So, that was the initial spark. And then, the more I thought about these big transitions in evolutionary history, I kept seeing this pattern that plants would do something and then animal life would respond.
One of the greatest examples was when our fish ancestors were coming out of the swamps, what we call the coal swamps now. There were these bizarre ancient trees that were ferns that grew to tree size, and there were giant bugs everywhere, and all this stuff, and I realized that the whole reason our ancestors came onto land was to eat the bugs that were there because the plants got there first.
AM: Mass extinction hits a little closer to home than I’d like, these days. Does it help at all, to learn to think about it in this sort of multi-million or billion-year-old context? Does it give you a different way of looking at the planetary scale disaster, and other disasters, that are happening right now?
RB: Yeah, that’s the perspective of deep time, as we say when we're trying to be poetic. It is a comfort, because life has never gone entirely extinct on this planet, from the time that the first life appeared.
Life has never entirely been extinguished. It's been through at least five major mass extinctions, and probably a whole bunch that we can't even detect just yet. Catastrophes.
So, I would rather, you know, for six mile wide asteroids not hit the planet. I would rather volcanoes not cover hundreds of millions of square miles with lava, and spew carbon dioxide into the air. But in each of these circumstances there were surviving creatures that rebuilt ecosystems just by existing.
This is also where it dovetails with some of my thoughts on queerness. The more we express ourselves, the more diversity that we see. There's a reason I cannot keep up with the flags that keep coming out. They're all beautiful, they’re lovely, but I also love the fact that, as we've talked more, and found ourselves more, and interacted with each other, we create this broadening out.
I see the same thing happening with life itself. You have these survivors that are in what we call crisis communities, and things are kind of homogenous for a little while, but through their interactions, by living alongside each other and through the push and pull of existence, you build ecosystems from the ground up all over again.
But we also have a responsibility for our choices. If we are actively causing harm the difference between us and the asteroid is we can choose not to be the asteroid, we can choose not to cause this disaster.
I feel like with nature people think it's this outside thing that is meant to be untouched or pristine, but our fingerprints are all over the thing. We've had our fingerprints all over you know the natural world since we existed. We're part of it, and recognizing how intertwined we are is how I think things are going to change.
AM: How do we square this idea of humans as just advanced animals with different drives and instincts from this other idea that we have a moral imperative to do something different, to protect the planet rather than just follow our drives and instincts?
RB: For many people, it feels so hopeless when things that we can do like turn off the lights or buy a more efficient car are not enough. The major polluters are corporations and governments, and the decisions are being made above our pay grade. It's a challenging one to square, because we've created a society and a culture in which we don't get time to think about how we can make the planet better.
But, I feel like the more that we can show up with intent and care, just at a base level, especially when our attention is constantly so divided, it's a start. And, you know, maybe we should feel some greater responsibility here. Maybe we should feel responsibility to people that we're never going to meet, never going to see on the other side of the planet.
AM: I always think, at least if I can act in a way where, if there was a mass sentiment to get things moving in a good direction, then I would be either helping to get that started or contributing to it in some way.
RB: I was reading Erasing History and I was reading Before We Were Trans and I'm thinking about how, in this moment of global fascism and all these grand problems, that I often feel we have to be as quick as we can, because there's no time to waste.
But, when you look at the history of people who faced anti-queer sentiment, people in the McCarthy era and the lavender scare, so many of the people we look up to were just trying to
survive and make a living. They were trying to protect themselves, and their families and friends. I think sometimes we get so in our own heads trying to have the most perfect crystallized course of action, when really so much of this is survival and just trying to make it and bring as many people as we can with us.
AM: Most of our interviews have so far have been of people who are professionally trans. I am also professionally trans, and so I wanted to ask you, as someone writing cool stuff about paleontology and dinosaurs and plants: What's it like to not be professionally trans?
RB: That's an interesting thing to ask because sometimes I feel like I am.
I came out just before my book Skeleton Keys hit shelves, and it was like, well, I just got divorced, I'm living by myself in a garden level apartment, I'm starting my transition in Utah of all places, and I need to make money. I need to continue my career because I don't have any other support. I basically just needed to hit the ground running and accept this is going to be messy and I'm just gonna have to deal with that. And I think that became part of my professional sphere.
Even though I’m this paleo person and I write primarily about dinosaurs and fossils it's this bizarre thing where I'm not specifically on the trans beat, but it’s certainly threaded through a great deal of my work almost because it felt, you know, obligatory is probably too strong a word, but it felt like if I'm the one trans person in my field that everybody knows I want to try and do something with it for for good. I feel like I didn't really get a choice in terms of how I want to guide my own transition in terms of privacy or really forming myself and then reintroducing myself to the world.
But it does feel nice that I can also just write a deck of 52 cards all about dinosaur facts. There's a place for both. I'm already pigeonholed enough by being the dinosaur lady online so I don't want to be pigeonholed further as like I only talk about queer dinosaurs.
AM: Did transitioning hurt your career?
RB: I think so, but it’s hard to tell. It's like when a stranger misgenders you. Sometimes you don’t know, is this purely accidental, or is this malicious?
I live in Utah and I wear brightly colored clothing and I'm obviously queer. I get looks all the time and I can't tell whether these are scorn or curiosity or what it is. But, I have noticed some shifts in my career. I feel like I get invited to do field work much less often than I used to, partially because I've been critical of field culture in paleontology and how cis masculine and alcohol driven it is. I've tried to speak up for myself in the field after being constantly misgendered, and I don't get invited back after that.
And I don't think it's all that surprising that the first couple of books I wrote, particularly My Beloved Brontosaurus and Skeleton Keys, both got reviewed very positively by the New York Times. Then, when The Last Days of the Dinosaurs came out, which i think is a far better work, it was complete silence.
I did a book event in October where I gave a short presentation about When the Earth Was Green and a little Q&A afterward, and when the newsletter version of this came out all the stuff I said about queerness and transness was taken out.
And, even though I'm very explicit about queerness in the conclusions of my books, a lot of reviewers don't necessarily mention that, and the people that do it's usually negative.
AM: So, do you want to close with: Why should people buy your book?
RB: I want people to pick up When the Earth Was Green and enjoy it. I don't really care if they remember all the facts about the history of life, what I want is for it to change the way they think about the world around them.
It’s an invitation to stop, and look, and think about how much you touch the past in everyday things around us.
You know, even the formation of our bodies and who we are as a species is directly tied to plants, because we are basically arboreal creatures that evolved to move around on the ground. So we look at trees and that is part of our ancestry, part of our legacy. I feel like it changes how you understand yourself.