Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution

The Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution (abbreviated KTR) describes the intense diversification of angiosperms, insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals during the Middle to Late Cretaceous.^[1]

Before the paper described the KTR, it had been widely accepted in paleontology that new families of dinosaurs evolved during Mid to Late Cretaceous, including the euhadrosaurs, neoceratopsians, ankylosaurids, pachycephalosaurs, caracharodontosaurines, troodontids, dromaeosaurs, and ornithomimosaurs.^[1] However, the authors of the paper have suggested that the apparent "new diversification" of dinosaurs during this time is due to sampling biases in the fossil record, and better preserved fossils in Cretaceous age sediments than in earlier Triassic or Jurassic sediments.

After the publication of the paper, many news organizations misrepresented the findings by stating that dinosaurs seemed to have stopped evolving during the end of their reign.^[2] The actual journal article, however states that "dinosaurs did not experience a progressive decline at the end of the Cretaceous, nor was their evolution driven directly by the KTR."^[1]

See also

• K–T boundary
• Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Dinosaurs and the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution. 2008. G.T. Lloyd et al. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 275: 2483-2490.
2. ^ Daily Mail article