The deinosuchus is an extinct group of alligatoroid crocodilians, related to modern alligators and caimans, that lived over 73 million years ago.
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What is the closest living animal to a dinosaur?
Crocodilians are the most closely related group. Before crocodiles were put in the larger family group, archosaurs, they evolved. Birds are the only descendants of the giant, extinct dinosaurs, and crocodiles and alligators are related to birds. The crocodile is the largest living reptile. It is found in tropical and subtropical regions of Africa, Asia, Australia, South America and the Caribbean.
Why did alligators survive the dinosaurs?
They lived in places that were the least affected by the asteroid. Crocodiles have been around for millions of years, and they have adapted to living in a variety of environments. They can survive in water, on land, in the ocean and even on the sea floor.
In fact, some of the oldest crocodile fossils date back to the Cretaceous period, which is around 65 million years ago. This means that crocodilians have lived on Earth for at least 4.5 billion years.
How big were alligators when dinosaurs were around?
Dinosaurs lived with the ancient alligators. The evolution of giant creatures on Earth are featured in these periods. This size is much larger than modern-day crocodiles. Alligators have been around for millions of years, but the first alligator fossils were discovered in the late 19th century.
They were first described in 1872 by the French anatomist Louis Leakey, who named the species Alligator mississippiensis. The name is derived from the Greek words “alligator” and “mississippi,” which means “the Mississippi River” in Latin. Alligators are also known as “gator lizards” because of their large size and the fact that they are often found in swampy areas.
Are alligators the last dinosaurs?
The crocodiles and alligators are related to dinosaurs but are not descended from any of them. I don’t know about you, but I’m not a fan of the word “dinosaur.” It’s more accurate to that dinosaurs are a group of animals that lived during the Cretaceous Period, about 65 million years ago, and that they are the closest living relatives of all living animals, including humans.
That’s what they’re called in the scientific community. They’re also called the “raptors” because they were the first animals to walk on two legs, which is what we think of when we hear the term “triceratops” or “pterodactyl.” They were also known as “lizard-like” dinosaurs because of their long necks and the fact that their tails were much longer than those of modern-day lizards and crocodiles.
In fact, they had tails that were about twice as long as the longest tails of any living reptile or amphibian.
What killed the dinosaurs?
Scientists already know that an asteroid—or perhaps a comet—struck Earth off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The extinction of the dinosaurs is thought to have been caused by a decades-long impact winter at the Chicxulub crater. The image was taken from a distance of about 1.5 million miles (2.7 million kilometers) from Earth.
What existed before dinosaurs?
The pelycosaurs, archosaurs, and therapsids were the main players interrestrial life from the carboniferous to the middle triassic periods. Theropods, such as the sauropods and ornithischians, were the largest and most diverse group of dinosaurs, but they were not the only ones.
In the mid-1970s, paleontologist Robert Bakker and his colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) published a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in which they proposed a new classification system for dinosaurs based on the size and shape of their skulls. This system, called the “Bakkerian” classification, was later adopted by other researchers and is now the most widely used method for classifying dinosaurs.
Birds are a very different animal from dinosaurs in many ways.
