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The fossil history of flowering plants records the development of flowers and other distinctive structures of the angiosperms, now the dominant group of plants on land.The history is controversial as flowering plants appear in great diversity in the Cretaceous, with scanty and debatable records before that, creating a puzzle for evolutionary biologists that Charles Darwin named an "abominable ...
Teleost fish, the most diverse group of modern vertebrates continued to diversify during the Cretaceous with the appearance of their most diverse subgroup Acanthomorpha during this period. During the Early Cretaceous, flowering plants appeared and began to rapidly diversify, becoming the dominant group of plants across the Earth by the end of ...
Nevertheless, much of the research occurring during this period lacked rigor, evidential support or depended on tenuous assumptions. [8] Michael J. Benton called the years between 1920 and 1970 the "Dilettante Phase" of Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction research. [4]
Caytoniaceous seed ferns were another group of important plants during this time and are thought to have been shrub to small-tree sized. [16] Ginkgo-like plants were particularly common in the mid- to high northern latitudes. In the Southern Hemisphere, podocarps were especially successful, while Ginkgos and Czekanowskiales were rare. [15] [17]
Flowering plants radiated during the early Cretaceous, first in the tropics, but the even temperature gradient allowed them to spread toward the poles throughout the period. By the end of the Cretaceous, angiosperms dominated tree floras in many areas, although some evidence suggests that biomass was still dominated by cycads and ferns until ...
The elimination of dominant Cretaceous groups allowed other organisms to take their place, causing a remarkable amount of species diversification during the Paleogene Period. [29] After the K–Pg extinction event, biodiversity required substantial time to recover, despite the existence of abundant vacant ecological niches. [35]
Prehistoric plants of the Cretaceous Period, during the Late/Upper Mesozoic Era Subcategories. This category has the following 3 subcategories, out of 3 total. ...
The Late Cretaceous (100.5–66 Ma) is the younger of two epochs into which the Cretaceous Period is divided in the geologic time scale. Rock strata from this epoch form the Upper Cretaceous Series. The Cretaceous is named after creta, the Latin word for the white limestone known as chalk.