Cretaceous Period facts

While investigating facts about Cretaceous Period Dinosaurs and Cretaceous Period Animals, I found out little known, but curios details like:

Despite the title of the 1990 novel and 1993 movie "Jurassic Park", most of the dinosaurs depicted in these sources were from the Cretaceous period, not Jurassic.

how was the cretaceous period different from the jurassic period?

Despite the title, almost all the dinosaurs from Jurassic park lived during the Cretaceous period.

What developments occurred from the jurassic period to the cretaceous period?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what is the cretaceous period. Here are 18 of the best facts about Cretaceous Period Climate and Cretaceous Period Plants I managed to collect.

what dinosaurs lived in the cretaceous period?

1. There was a large body of water through much of North America called the "Western Interior Seaway" during the late Cretaceous Period

2. It’s doubtful that dinosaurs would be able to survive today. During the Cretaceous Period 145-66 million years ago the average global temperature was 4ºC higher than today, with little difference between the temperature of the equator and the poles

3. Coelacanths were thought to be extinct since the cretaceous period, yet they were discovered alive in 1938

4. Birds today did not evolve from pterodactyls. They actually evolved from small, meat-eating land dinosaurs that were covered in feathers and lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

5. During the late Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, the majority of the oceans reefs weren't built by corrals, but rather a group of bivalve clam like mollusks called Rudists.

6. Despite its prominent role in "Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic World", the T-Rex actually lived in the Late Cretaceous epoch, 45 million years after the Jurassic period ended

7. Therizinosaurus, a massive Theropod dinosaur that lived at the end of the Cretacous period. It had a wide frame supporting a pot belly for digesting plant matter and the largest claws of any animal known to science for stripping leaves off of trees (and very likely, defense).

8. The earliest form of grasses didn't exist until 60 and 55 million years ago, after the major extinction events that ended the age of dinosaurs and the Cretaceous period.

9. The Permian Period ended in a mass extinction even worse then the one at the end of the Cretaceous.

10. During the Cretaceous Period, tropical seas had an average surface water temperature of 99 degrees F (37 C), and would sometimes even go as high as 107 degrees F (42 C)

Why was the cretaceous period so warm?

You can easily fact check why is it called the cretaceous period by examining the linked well-known sources.

There is a dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous Period called the Irritator Challengeri. It was named that in reflection to how the paleontologists who found the heavily damaged and altered skull felt. It was damaged and altered by collectors.

The Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, and Triceratops, famous from Jurassic Park, lived in the Cretaceous, about 90 million years after the Jurassic Period. - source

During the Cretaceous Period, the South Pole could have been as warm as 90 F (32 C) - source

Penguins evolved 60-65 Ma ago in the late Cretaceous period. Meaning they could appear in a Jurassic Park film and chronologically fit in with many of the dinosaurs in the park.

The Cretaceous period (~100 Million years ago) seashore in Alabama is connected to how Alabama voted in 2016 - source

When was the cretaceous period?

A new dinosaur's genus that lived during the Late Cretaceous Period in what is now China.