Cretaceous Cretaceous The Cretaceous (, ) is a geologic period and system that spans 79 million years from the end of the Jurassic Period million years ago (mya) to the beginning of the Paleogene Period mya. It is the last period of the Mesozoic Era, and the longest period of the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cretaceous Period is usually abbreviated K, for its German translation "Kreide" (chalk, "creta" in Latin). The Cretaceous was a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high eustatic sea levels that created numerous shallow inland seas. These oceans and seas were populated with now-extinct marine reptiles,
Wasson Bluff dinosaur tracks, at his Parrsboro Rock and Mineral Shop and Museum. One of them, also found at Wasson Bluff, is a track that may have been made by a primitive, two-legged, crocodile-like creature that was nearly long. In January 1986, American paleontologists Paul Olsen and Neil Shubin announced they had recovered hundreds of thousands of bones at Wasson Bluff, the largest fossil find in North America dating from the geological period 200 million years ago known as the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. It was a time when massive lakes of lava spewed from fissures in the earth as the supercontinent Pangea broke