On the final day of the Cretaceous period, some 66 million years ago, Earth was teeming with a dazzling variety of dinosaurs.

The end-Cretaceous extinction created space in the ecosystem for birds, but also for mammals. Mammals first evolved from ancestors called therapsids during the late Triassic Period. These were tiny ...

Everyone knows that dinosaurs are extinct, and most people have some idea about how it might have occurred. But the exact periods in history when it happened are less well known. Was it a single ...

The Cretaceous Era—roughly 145 to 66 million years ago—was the last hurrah of the dinosaurs. A massive asteroid impact brought them to a violent end, but there’s more to the story. The Cretaceous ...

Sixty-six million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period, an asteroid impact near the Yucat n Peninsula of Mexico triggered the extinction of all known non-bird dinosaurs. But for the early ...

Researchers suggest that ground-based mammals fared better than their arboreal relatives during the end-Cretaceous extinction thanks to their lifestyle. Reading time 2 minutes The end-Cretaceous ...

Yale University ecologists reveal a lizard lineage that rode out the dinosaur-killing asteroid event with unexpected evolutionary survival traits. Night lizards (family Xantusiidae) survived the ...

The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction event, marking the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods approximately 66 million years ago, stands as one of the most profound ...

The Late Cretaceous modern (crown) bird,Vegavis iaai, pursuit diving for fish in the shallow ocean off the coast of the Antarctic peninsula, with ammonites and plesiosaurs forcompany. Sixty-six ...