Cretaceous

This cycle of investment, recovery, dormancy and reinvestment is one of the fundamental strategies of deciduous trees and has been refined over roughly 100 million years of evolution.

The earliest deciduous trees appeared in the fossil record during the Cretaceous period, when flowering plants were diversifying and spreading into temperate regions.

Before the evolution of deciduous trees, temperate forests were dominated by conifers, ferns and other plants that did not seasonally drop their leaves.

The evolution of the deciduous habit may have been driven by changing climate patterns, particularly the development of pronounced seasons with cold winters that made it advantageous to shed leaves.

Fossil leaves from the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic periods sometimes show evidence of autumn colour pigments, though the colours themselves are not preserved in the fossils.

Scientists can infer the presence of past pigments from the chemical residues found in exceptionally well-preserved fossil leaves, though this is difficult and the results are not always definitive.

The evolution of anthocyanin production in autumn leaves is thought to have occurred independently in many different plant lineages.

complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes inevitable dyer and peabody have read necronomicon and seen clark ashton smith's nightmare paintings based on text and will understand when i speak of elder things supposed to have created all earth life as jest or mistake Students have always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative treatment of very ancient tropical radiata, also like prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of, Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.

Vast field of study opened, deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early Eocene period, judging from associated specimens.

Massive stalagmites deposited above them.

hard work hewing out but toughness prevented damage state of preservation miraculous evidently owing to limestone action no more found so far but will resume search later job now to get fourteen huge specimens to camp without dogs which bark furiously and can't be trusted near them with nine men three left to guard the dogs we ought to manage the three sledges fairly well though wind is bad must establish plain communication with mcmurdo's sound and begin shipping material but i've got to dissect one of these things before we take any rest wish i had a real laboratory here dyer better kick himself for having tried to stop my westward trip first the world's greatest mountains and then this if this last isn't the high spot of the expedition i don't know what is we're made scientifically congrats pobodi on the drill that opened up the cave now will arkham please repeat description the sensations of pobodi and myself at receipt of this report were almost beyond description nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm McTeague, who had hastily translated a few high spots as they came from the droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his shorthand version as soon as Lake's operator signed off.

One, though, spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless abyss without visible means of descent.

Now and then we had a chance to study the petrified wood of a surviving shutter, and were impressed by the fabulous antiquity implied in the still discernible grain.

These things had come from Mesozoic gymnosperms and conifers, especially Cretaceous cyads.

and from fan-palms and early angiosperms of plainly tertiary date.

But as the young crow grows more and more into the typical bird pattern, this lizard-like peculiarity fades away.

and the separate pieces unite by anastomosis into a single coccygean bone as the osteologists call it in all our modern birds as in this crow the vertebrae composing the tail bone are few in number and are soldered together immovably in the adult form it was not always so however with ancestral birds the earliest known member of the class the famous fossil bird of the solenhoven lithographic stone retained throughout its whole life a long flexible tail composed of twenty unwelded vertebrae each of which bore a single pair of quill feathers the predecessors of our modern pigeon's chain There are many other marked reptilian peculiarities in this primitive oolitic bird, and it apparently possessed two teeth in its jaws, as its later Cretaceous kinsmen discovered by Professor Marsh undoubtedly did.

When we compare side by side those real flying dragons, the pterodactyls, Together with the very bird-like Deinosaurians on the one hand, and these early-toothed and lizard-tailed birds on the other, we can have no reasonable doubt in deciding that our own sparrows and swallows are the remote feathered descendants of an original reptilian or half-reptilian ancestor.

Why modern birds have lost their long flexible tails it is not difficult to see.

There had been Fafnir.

Conditions there would correspond to Terra during the Cretaceous period, but any Cretaceous dinosaur would have been cute and cuddly to the things on Fafnir.

Then there had been Imhaptep.

In twenty or thirty thousand years it would be a fine planet, but at present it was undergoing an extensive glaciation.

of these things.

A lot of people think, I think, have got this misconception that, especially from the Cretaceous extinction with the dinosaurs, where it's just instant boom, meteor hits.

Yeah.

I'm laughing because it's horrifying to think about.

But I did look into this, and apparently in the Ice Age, there was just no saber-toothed squirrel.

That is not a thing, sadly.

But there was in Cretaceous Argentina.

There was a small insectivorous mammal that kind of looked like Scrat and that had pretty large teeth.

solar panels everywhere

yes it is it is so yeah so um there were various extinction events going on through this um period that was The Cretaceous mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs, was 26th

of December.

OK, Boxing Day.

And primates.

I think the earliest fossil primates are something like 50-something million years.

There were mammals before the Cretaceous mass extinction.

They were small.

Spinal lunges forward and...

Wait! Oh no! Holy Cretaceous! Did you see that? Head referee Tiny Tim the 6 inch compass Ignathus has accidentally been eaten by the T-Rex! It appears that Tiny Tim was standing on the edge of T-Rex's final burger platter to check the finish line when T-Rex accidentally ate him! T-Rex was moving so fast he didn't even look! I don't know what to tell you! He just got too close to my plate! I was just trying to finish the race! What's that? What's that?

Hey guys, Dino Dad back here again and it appears that referee Tiny Tim is blowing his whistle from inside T-Rex's belly right now.

But don't worry, the emergency team is currently working on pulling him out.