cretaceous

Um, you do know that the Cretaceous is part of the Mesozoic, right?

The fact that one is from the Triassic while the other is from the Cretaceous doesn't make the latter less of a dinosaur.

> The climate of the Cretaceous The Cretaceous isn't when the fossil fuels were formed; that was much earlier, during the Carboniferous.

Geochemical evidence has shown that Jurassic and Cretaceous air contained about as much oxygen as today, if not a little less.

If the pessimists are correct, death due to climage changes will be a mass extinction like the end of the Cretaceous period.

The Cretaceous period, for instance, was hotter and had more CO2 than the current amounts, but had huge plants and reptiles (dinosaurs).

This reminds me of the recent episode of Radiolab that suggested the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous might have taken only a few hours[1].

By the time the Cretaceous environment recovered, birdosaurs could not regain their place on the top of the food chain because that space was taken over by mammals.

But now a team from the US Geological Survey has identified a body of underground water that is actually a remnant of a past ocean water, a body of Early Cretaceous North Atlantic sea water.

If you consider this: "The climate of the Cretaceous is less certain and more widely disputed.

For example, flowers did not exist in the Cretaceous, so somebody looking at what evolution did until then would say “if evolution did not invent flowers, then we’d better not do it”.

The first major clue is the presence of iridium (a metal common in asteroids) at exactly the right place in the rocks (the Cretaceous-Tertiary or "KT" boundary, dating to 65 million years ago, which is also when non-avian dinosaurs went extinct).

Okay, putting on my astronomer hat: The asteroid was the root cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.

Do you credit the millionth timid mammal, your potential forebear, for surviving the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction?

If only scientists had the option to check all their theories by spinning up snapshots of Cretaceous–Paleogene Earth in a test universe.