![2H2KWF7 Flowers and trees during the Cretaceous period, illustration](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/04125247/SEI_169400319.jpg?width=1200)
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 …