Riley Black

Riley Black is an American paleontologist and science writer. She is the author of several natural history books such as When the Earth was Green and The Last Days of the Dinosaurs. She has consulted on the Jurassic World franchise and starred in multiple paleontology documentaries. She began her career as a science writer by launching the blog Laelaps and eventually branched out to write columns for a number of popular periodicals.

She is an author. Her books include When the Earth was Green (released in 2025), The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Skeleton Keys, and My Beloved Brontosaurus.

Black was hired as "resident paleontologist" for the 2015 film Jurassic World. She is a regular guest on the radio show/podcast Science Friday and have starred in the 2022 documentaries Alaskan Dinosaurs and Dinosaur Apocalypse.

In 2019, she came out publicly as transgender and non-binary and started hormone replacement therapy. In the journal Nature, she remarked that “palaeontology presents queer people with terrain as challenging as any fossil-flecked desert.”

Reception Publishers Weekly praised her work on Last Days of Dinosaurs as “top-drawer science writing” that carefully explains to the reader the myriad ways in which scientists reach her conclusions. Booklist said "her work vividly provides the deep knowledge necessary—knowledge of geology, evolution, ecology, paleontology, and more—to understand and appreciate the history and future of life on our planet." In 2023, she won an award for Excellence in Science Books from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.