Chapter 12 Cretaceous extinction events
readx;? Neptunesaurus fed on seabirds, glamour, sharks, turtles, ammonites, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, lamellars, and other dragons. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ļ½ļ½ļ½Uļ½Eć Info Like other predators, Neptunesaurus was very territorial. They have few natural predators, and their biggest threat may be competition from their own kind. In order to fight for territory, Neptune Rex may launch attacks on its own kind, and such fights are often deadly.
Cangsaurus lived in the ocean about 10,000 years ago and is a carnivorous marine reptile. It has a large head, strong jaws, and sharp teeth, and resembles a crocodile with flippers.
The Cyanosaurus was the largest apex predator in the Mesozoic oceans.
About 95 million years ago, its ancestors, the lizard, fled to the ocean in the face of the same threat of dinosaur death on land. Dallas lizards evolved about 92 million years ago, by which time they had fully adapted to life in the ocean and could no longer return to life on land. At this time, they are only about 1 meter long. They evolved into Cangsaurus about 86 million years ago.
The smallest known species of the dragon, 3 to 3.5 meters long, lived mainly in the shallow waters of the shore, and used its bulbous teeth to catch mollusks and sea urchins for food. The larger Cangosaurus resembles the Hoffmann Canglong, with a body length of up to 21 meters and a weight of 33 tons.
The head of the dragon was stronger than that of other dragons, and due to the tight joints between the jaw bones, the dragon could not swallow its prey whole, as early dragons (such as Neptunex) did. The teeth of the dragon are sharp and conical, curved in the shape of barbs, and the jaws produce a huge torque while biting together, which can bite the prey at the waist and bite off. In addition, there is a ring of internal teeth inside the upper jaw for dragging food. Scientists speculate that the dragon should have bitten or torn its prey to the appropriate size and then swallowed it, which was extremely bloody.
Canglong's vision is weak, but its sense of smell and hearing is very developed. The tongue, which they inherited from their ancestors, is still the main organ of sniffing, and their ears have a special structure that amplifies sounds up to 38 times. The dragon used a set of nerves on the side of the palate and snout to detect pressure waves from its prey to determine the exact location of its target, much like killer whales today used sound localization.
The body of the dragon is long barrel-shaped, the tail is strong, and it is highly hydrodynamic. It has five toes on its forelimbs and four toes on its hind limbs, and its limbs have evolved into flippers, with its forelimbs larger than its hind limbs, and its short, thick and powerful flippers allow it to quickly change direction in the water, greatly increase its agility, and even jump out of the water to hunt. Its tail is half its length and is a broad, flat vertical paddle-shaped, with expanded bony vertebrae above and below the tail vertebrae, forming a powerful swimming tool. It travels in a way similar to how a modern crocodile swims in water, with its tail waging from side to side like a whip and reaching a top speed of about 48.3 km/h. This style of swimming can achieve great speed in a short period of time, but it is not conducive to long-term high-speed chases, so Canglong is a good hunter for stealth and explosive power. The early Neptune and later Neptunes wiped out marine reptiles, plesiosaurs, other marine reptiles, and even sharks, which predates much earlier than it.
It can be said that in the late White Period, both marine and terrestrial ecosystems were extremely fragile. If there is enough time to self-regulate, perhaps the ecological balance can be restored. For example, a large number of carnivorous dinosaurs starved to death or killed each other due to lack of food, thus reducing the proportion of carnivorous and herbivorous animals, perhaps allowing the ecosystem to be adjusted.
At this time, another condition that can affect the entire ecological balance is also quietly changing. In the early days, the concentration of carbon dioxide was very high, but as plants continued to photosynthesize for hundreds of millions of years, the concentration of carbon dioxide gradually decreased, making the greenhouse effect lower and the temperature gradually lowering. This is quietly threatening the survival of the dinosaur-like reptiles.
But the temperature is changing slowly, and creatures such as dinosaurs have plenty of time to actively adapt to this slow change.
But an asteroid (or comet emitted by the Oort Nebula orbiting the solar system) caused this cooling process to occur in a very short period of time.
Chicxulub meteorite impact:
About 66 million years ago, an asteroid or comet with a diameter of at least 10 kilometers struck the middle of today's American continent, off the coast of today's Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the Pangea period.
The impact created a massive crater 180 kilometers wide that cut off the entire Americas, leaving a large number of islands in Central America on the map of the Americas today.
The impact produced 1 million times more energy than the most powerful earthquake in human history, and the explosion was 10,000 times more energy than the total number of nuclear weapons exploding on Earth, causing 21,000 cubic kilometers of material to enter the atmosphere.
The Chicxulub impact triggered massive tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, and the debris and dust from the impact caused global storms that covered the planet with black clouds for years.
Due to the large amount of high-density dust in the atmosphere, sunlight cannot reach the earth, causing the earth's surface temperature to decrease rapidly.
Without sunlight, plants, including algae in the ocean, are gradually withering and dying; without plants, herbivorous creatures on both land and sea begin to starve to death on a large scale; and all kinds of animals, such as carnivorous dinosaurs and mosasaurs, have lost their food sources and are slowly dying out in despair and cannibalism. Some dinosaurs hid to safety and persisted for about 2 million years after the impact, eventually dying out due to their large size and appetite, which made them unable to adapt to the harsh climate and food shortages.
The catastrophe eventually led to the extinction of about 17 percent of families, 50 percent of genera, and 75 to 80 percent of the world's species. Dinosaurs, cantosaurs, pterosaurs, and ammonites disappeared together.
Almost all large land animals have not been spared. Small terrestrial animals, like some mammals and some small birds, survived on the remnants of food, and finally survived the most difficult times, waiting for the Paleogene terrestrial vertebrates to flourish again.