Cretaceous period
3
7.7
- noun
- /krɪˈteɪʃəs ˈpɪərəd/
- Specialized
:
período cretácico
- 80 million years ago during the cretaceous period, these plains were the floor of a huge inland sea.
- end of the Cretaceous period
- Cretaceous period, 65 million
- late Cretaceous period
Examples
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The earliest known sauropod appeared about 215 million years ago, during the Late Triassic period, and the last of the kind lived until the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, when a worldwide cataclysm wiped out all dinosaurs except the birds.
Academic text (2007) -
The food web for ecological groups in the Cretaceous Period is reported in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Blog text (21) -
Try to imagine yourself in the Cretaceous Period.
Fiction book (1993) -
Of course, if you're familiar with the Cretaceous Period, you probably know all of this.
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70 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous Period of planet Earth, there lived a miraculous bird.
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Dinosaurs had died out in the Cretaceous period, sixty-five million years ago.
Fiction book (1990) -
When the great mountain building took place during the Cretaceous Period, seaways drained and swamps dried up.
Fiction book (1990) -
One of the classic examples of evolution in the fossil record is provided by the heart urchin Micraster, a resident of northern European seas between 90 and 80 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period.
Academic text (1992) -
The distribution and variations among living species of Acropyga lead me to think that, in fact, the genus originated even earlier than the Miocene period, perhaps as early as the Cretaceous period, between 144 and 65 million years ago.
Academic text (2006) -
During the Cretaceous period, which lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago, dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
Synonyms
4
9.8
A period about 145 to 66 million years ago when dinosaurs were common and flowering plants appeared
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is a straightforward adjective + noun composition: 'Cretaceous' names a specific geological time interval and 'period' denotes a measured interval, so the meaning 'the Cretaceous time period' is directly derivable from the constituents. This is a compositional, label-like term (and is represented similarly across many languages), so learners who know both words will understand the MWE.
Etymology
Cretaceous period gets its name from Cretaceous, a Latin word meaning 'chalk', because many rocks from that time are chalky, like the White Cliffs of Dover. So the name points to a long time when dinosaurs lived and many new plants appeared.