Riley Black

Riley has been a fossil fanatic since the time she was knee-high to a Stegosaurus. Her evolution into a science writer and amateur paleontologist was only natural. Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, right in the center of dinosaur country, she chases tales of vanished lives from museum collections to remote badlands.

A prolific writer, Riley wrote her popular Laelaps blog for publications such as WIRED, National Geographic, and Scientific American for more than a decade. Her fossil-filled tweets have led Business Insider to call her one of the top "science social media wizards" and HLN to dub her one of "Twitter's 8 coolest geeks", as well, and she was the host of Parallax Film’s Dinologue. And in a childhood dream come true, Riley was also hired to be the "resident paleontologist" for Jurassic World. In 2022, she also appeared as part of the NOVA documentaries “Alaskan Dinosaurs” and “Dinosaur Apocalypse.”

Riley also freelances for a variety of publications - from National Geographic to Slate - and has written ten books in as many years. Her first, Written in Stone, was an exploration about what evolution's great transitions tell us about our place in nature, and her second, My Beloved Brontosaurus, was a critically-acclaimed romp with the new dinosaurs science is bringing to life. She wrote two books in 2014 - the National Geographic special issue When Dinosaurs Ruled and Prehistoric Predators, illustrated by Julius Csotonyi. She followed those books with Skeleton Keys, an exploration of the natural and unnatural history of our skeletons, and the children’s search-and-find book Did You See That Dinosaur? Her latest titles include the coffee table book Deep Time and The Last Days of the Dinosaurs with St. Martin’s Press, a scientifically-inspired narrative of how the Age of Dinosaurs ended and the Age of Mammals began. Riley has two more titles in press - Deep Water and Dinosaurs: Profiles From a Lost World - as she works up the sequel to Last Days.

But Riley does more than just write about fossils. Every summer she volunteers with an array of museums and universities to discover and excavate new specimens. These expeditions have taken her from the arid deserts of New Mexico to a Wyoming cave filled with Ice Age mammal bones. Visits to lost worlds fuel Riley's writing and her enthusiasm for life's amazing history.