Doomsday Detectives

Doomsday Detectives is a middle grade nonfiction book about one of the great scientific puzzles: what happened to the dinosaurs. It follows father and son scientists Luis and Walter Alvarez, along with a wider team of scientific investigators, as they work out the answer. The Cretaceous is often called the age of dinosaurs, but the book describes it as an age of life in every form, scaled and feathered, furry and leathered, until doomsday arrived. For 66 million years the story of that last day of the ancient world lay buried under layers of sand and silt, until scientists began fitting the clues together. The book traces the timeline of discoveries in physics, paleontology, astronomy and geology that had to come first before anyone could understand how and why 75 percent of species suddenly went extinct. It shows how the smallest particles in the universe helped explain the fate of the largest animals ever to walk the planet. More broadly, it is an account of how scientists add to human knowledge one question at a time, and how that work helps us understand the world we live in.