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It marked the end of the Cretaceous period, and with it the Mesozoic era, while heralding the beginning of the current era, the Cenozoic. In the geologic record , the K–Pg event is marked by a thin layer of sediment called the K–Pg boundary, Fatkito boundary or K–T boundary , which can be found throughout the world in marine and ...
A study aiming to quantify the habitat of latest Cretaceous North American dinosaurs, based on data from fossil occurrences and climatic and environmental modelling, and evaluating its implications for inferring whether dinosaur diversity was in decline prior to the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, was published by Chiarenza et al ...
Because of the relatively young age and great thickness of the system, Cretaceous rocks are evident in many areas worldwide. Chalk is a rock type characteristic for (but not restricted to) the Cretaceous. It consists of coccoliths, microscopically small calcite skeletons of coccolithophores, a type of algae that prospered in the Cretaceous seas.
The Paleogene Period (IPA: / ˈ p eɪ l i. ə dʒ iː n,-l i. oʊ-, ˈ p æ l i-/ PAY-lee-ə-jeen, -lee-oh-, PAL-ee-; also spelled Palaeogene or Palæogene) is a geologic period and system that spans 43 million years from the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 Ma (million years ago) to the beginning of the Neogene Period 23.04 Ma.
The Cretaceous is justly famous for its chalk; indeed, more chalk formed in the Cretaceous than in any other period in the Phanerozoic. [51] Mid-ocean ridge activity—or rather, the circulation of seawater through the enlarged ridges—enriched the oceans in calcium; this made the oceans more saturated, as well as increased the bioavailability ...
Luis Walter Alvarez, left, and his son Walter, right, at the K–T Boundary in Gubbio, Italy, 1981. The Alvarez hypothesis posits that the mass extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs and many other living things during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event was caused by the impact of a large asteroid on the Earth.
In a landmark paper published in 1982, Jack Sepkoski and David M. Raup identified five particular geological intervals with excessive diversity loss. [2] They were originally identified as outliers on a general trend of decreasing extinction rates during the Phanerozoic, [3] but as more stringent statistical tests have been applied to the accumulating data, it has been established that in the ...
c. 66.038 ± 0.011 Ma – Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous Period marks the end of the Mesozoic era and the age of the dinosaurs; start of the Paleogene Period and the current Cenozoic era.