Examples of Cretaceous in the following topics:
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- Angiosperms, which evolved in the Cretaceous period, are a diverse group of plants which protect their seeds within an ovary called a fruit.
- Fossil evidence indicates that flowering plants first appeared in the Lower Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago, and were rapidly diversifying by the Middle Cretaceous, about 100 million years ago .
- A few early Cretaceous rocks show clear imprints of leaves resembling angiosperm leaves.
- By the mid-Cretaceous, a staggering number of diverse, flowering plants crowd the fossil record.
- This leaf imprint shows a Ficus speciosissima, an angiosperm that flourished during the Cretaceous period.
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- The dominance of dinosaurs lasted until the end of the Cretaceous period, the end of the Mesozoic Era.
- The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction resulted in the loss of most of the large-bodied animals of the Mesozoic Era.
- Pterosaurs, which existed from the late Triassic to the Cretaceous period (210 to 65.5 million years ago), possessed wings, but are not believed to have been capable of powered flight.
- Edmontonia, an example of an extinct quadruped reptile, was an armored dinosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous period, 145.5 to 65.6 million years ago.
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- During the Cretaceous period, a group known as the Enantiornithes was the dominant bird type .
- These birds formed an evolutionary line separate from modern birds; they did not survive past the Cretaceous.
- Along with the Enantiornithes, Ornithurae birds (the evolutionary line that includes modern birds) were also present in the Cretaceous.
- It did not survive past the Cretaceous period.
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- The causes of the end-Cretaceous extinction event are the ones that are best understood.
- This hypothesis, proposed first in 1980, was a radical explanation based on a sharp spike in the levels of iridium (which rains down from space in meteors at a fairly constant rate, but is otherwise absent on earth's surface) at the rock stratum that marks the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods .
- The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary marked the disappearance of the dinosaurs in fossils, as well as many other taxa.
- Recovery times for biodiversity after the end-Cretaceous extinction were shorter, in geological time, than for the end-Permian extinction: on the order of 10 million years.
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- Another mass extinction event occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period, bringing the Mesozoic Era to an end.
- Changes in animal species diversity during the late Cretaceous and early Cenozoic were also promoted by a dramatic shift in earth's geography, as continental plates slid over the crust into their current positions, leaving some animal groups isolated on islands and continents or separated by mountain ranges or inland seas from other competitors.
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- The coelacanth, sometimes called a lobe-finned fish, was thought to have gone extinct in the Late Cretaceous period, 100 million years ago, until one was discovered in 1938 near the Comoros Islands between Africa and Madagascar.
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- After the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs (birds are generally regarded as the surviving dinosaurs) and several other mammalian groups, placental and marsupial mammals diversified into many new forms and ecological niches throughout the Paleogene and Neogene, by the end of which all modern orders had appeared.