Dark matter and the dinosaurs - Lisa Randall

Selected as a Book of the Year by Mail on Sunday and Financial Times

66 million years ago, a ten-mile-wide object from outer space hurtled into the Earth at incredible speed and destroyed the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet.

Where did it come from, and why? And how is this connected to dark matter - the most mysterious, elusive stuff in the universe, that interacts with gravity like ordinary matter but doesn't emit or absorb light. Astronomers know it's there but it is literally invisible.

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs tells the story of Big Bang theory, cosmological inflation, the makeup of the universe and our solar system's place in it; it's about mass extinctions through the ages, what we know has hit the Earth and what might hit us in the future. And it explores the radical idea that dark matter might ultimately have been responsible for the dinosaurs' extinction.

A horizon-expanding tour of the cosmos that blends what we know about the universe with new thinking, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs is a book full of wonders, from a gifted scientist and writer.