Cretaceous period: Animals, plants and extinction event
The Cretaceous period was the last and longest segment of the Mesozoic era. It lasted approximately 79 million years, from the minor extinction event that closed the Jurassic period about 145 million years ago to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago. The name comes from"creta," the Latin word for chalk, because of widespread chalk deposits dating from the period, according to the National Park Service .
However, Jurassic-era flowering plants would have been uncommon and may also have been evolutionary links between older plants that resembled angiosperms and the real thing, found in the Cretaceous, researchers said. Scientists generally place"the oldest uncontested" angiosperm fossils at about 125 million to 130 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous, according to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden .
Thanks to pollinating insects, flowering plants had tremendous advantages over plants that spread pollen only by wind, spurring the explosion of angiosperms, according to Illinois Extension at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign .
Cretaceous period animalsThe Cretaceous was an age of reptiles. Dinosaurs dominated the land, while marine reptiles like the mosasaurs — which could span 56 feet — swam the oceans. Pterosaurs plied the skies, including the largest flying animal ever, Quetzalcoatlus, whose wingspan could stretch to 36 feet .
The earliest fossilized bird, Archaeopteryx, swooped through Cretaceous skies 150 million years ago, though it resembled small dinosaurs more than the birds we see today, according to the Australian Museum . A variety of birds arrived on the scene soon afterward sporting a range of features that could be more like those of current birds.
The Chicxulub crater in the Yucatán Peninsula, which spans more than 110 miles in diameter, is the likely landing spot of the dinosaur-killing asteroid. This crater dates to within 33,000 years of the K-Pg event, Live Science previously reported.
"This rain of hot dust raised global temperatures for hours after the impact and cooked alive animals that were too large to seek shelter," Kruk said."Small animals that could shelter underground, underwater, or perhaps in caves or large tree trunks, may have been able to survive this initial heat blast."
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