Engagingly telling the story of how the impact hypothesis revolutionized how scientists think about the end-Cretaceous extinction, Night Comes to the Cretaceous was praised by David Fastovsky as "clearly the best" of "the welter of whodunits explaining the extinctions (including the dinosaurs) at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) bounday 65 million years ago ... The prose is spare, yet lucid, and the book is lucidly written." Former director and president of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, Powell is also the author of Grand Canyon: Solving Earth's Grandest Puzzle and The Mysteries of Terra Firma: The Age and Evolution of the Earth.