When the Earth Was Green

Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance

De: Riley Black

Narrado por: Wren Mack

“You'll root for these creatures and their survival. A marvelous narration.”—Booklist

“Paleontologist Riley Black’s vivid writing and Wren Mack’s wonderstruck narration make these vignettes of prehistoric life on Earth fascinating listening.”—AudioFile

Winner, A Friend of Darwin Award, 2024

A gorgeously composed look at the longstanding relationship between prehistoric plants and life on Earth

Fossils plants allow us to touch the lost worlds from billions of years of evolutionary backstory. Each petrified leaf and root show us that dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and even humans would not exist without the evolutionary efforts of their leafy counterparts. It has been the constant growth of plants that have allowed so many of our favorite, fascinating prehistoric creatures to evolve, oxygenating the atmosphere, coaxing animals onto land, and forming the forests that shaped our ancestors’ anatomy. It is impossible to understand our history without them. Or, our future.

Using the same scientifically informed narrative technique that listeners loved in the award-winning The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black brings us back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded. Each chapter stars plants and animals alike, underscoring how the interactions between species have helped shape the world we call home. As the chapters move upwards in time, Black guides listeners along the burgeoning trunk of the Tree of Life, stopping to appreciate branches of an evolutionary story that links the world we know with one we can only just perceive now through the silent stone, from ancient roots to the present.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

©2025 Riley Black (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Black’s creative writing style and vivid descriptions, paired with well-chosen scientific facts, transport readers to verdant, sometimes violent scenes from our planet’s past." —Booklist

"BLACK IS A POET OF PREHISTORY, narrating the final moments of a gooey mosquito or the accidental, tree-bound voyage of a monkey with the detail of someone who was there and saw it all, millions of years ago.... This is a book steeped with vegetal beauty, one that unfurls like a flower, blooming." —Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches and staff writer at Defector

“BRILLIANT, BRIMMING WITH INSIGHT, and boundlessly entertaining. Black launches a grand tour of deep time, surveying the influence of plant life on animal evolution (and vice versa). It’s a 1.2 billion-year fandango, masterfully chronicled.” —Jason Roberts, author of Every Living Thing and A Sense of the World

“AN ESSENTIAL, EXTRAORDINARY STORY...Black shows us how the natural world has always been a splendid, entangled scrum of interactions and transactions." —Daniel Lewis, author of Twelve Trees, Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology, Huntington Library

Science storytelling at its best!

Excellent story telling with impressive scientific explanations really help put the listener within the mind frame of species throughout time. Impeccable!

The Book I've Been Looking For

This is the book that I have been looking for! I was glad to find a work that dealt with paleobotany and stressed the importance of plants for the history of life. I enjoyed the author's re-creations of life in past eras. And I found the use of appendices helpful and enlightening. I am very much a science nerd but I can recommend "When the Earth Was Green" for anyone interested in the natural world.

I loved the mosquito

I just wanted to hear about the characters one last time in the conclusion but there wasn’t any mention of anything.

variety of plants

newest research about megafauna, and the animals that likely lived among them and how they may have migrated

a good book

a very thoughtful and well written book. that follows the ecological history of the planet into deep time.

AMAZING-READ QUEER BOOKS

The conclusion of this book had me in tears this book is so well written, I love it and the science is awesome!!

Fabulous!!

A grand view of evolving earth which makes sense to us today. Now that’s brilliant!!

a spectacular look into the world of paleobotany

Riley black a talented and accomplished author and paleontologist outdoes herself and exceeds all expectations. often playing theater of the Mind into the world of cellular biology and paleobotany. reading this book won't make you an expert on the subject but it will leave you with a better and more wholesome understanding of the world of ancient plants and how they developed. I can't recommend this book enough.

No argument

The book just seems like disoriented commentaries one after the other, without a common focus or a central idea that progresses with the book. I was puzzled about it; I was finishing a book and I was unable to tell what it was about. And, as a final odd turn, we get a long narrative about the author’s gender identity, their transgender journey and how they look at trees and think about queerness. It felt almost like a had been clickbaited.

Not my cup of tea

Boring. Did not like the narrator or the content. This book was just not for me.