How to Use Cretaceous in a Sentence

Cretaceous

adjective
  • The sparkle comes from fragments of fossilized clams and snails that lived and died in Cretaceous ponds and lakes.
    — Kristi Curry Rogers, Scientific American, 2024-02-01
  • These teeth spanned a wide age range, from the modern era back to the Cretaceous period.
    — Melissa Cristina Márquez, Forbes, 2025-03-01
  • Not all experts are convinced this means Cretaceous ants, too, chatted via pheromones.
    — science.org, 2024-07-03
  • The king of the dinosaurs may have not been the only Cretaceous carnivore to prey on its own kin.
    — Alex Orlando, Discover Magazine, 2024-05-01
  • The deposit would have been on the seafloor when it was formed during the Cretaceous period.
    — Sara Hashemi, Smithsonian Magazine, 2025-05-23
  • Though grass has been around since the late Cretaceous period, it’s only been widespread for about twenty-five million years.
    — Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker, 2023-11-06
  • New Orleans to the Cretaceous Era and beyond, as they become locked in a battle of wills that spans millions of years.
    — Borys Kit, The Hollywood Reporter, 2022-09-14
  • This is quite unusual as most dinosaurs that died in the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods are found without their skull.
    — Rachel Cormack, Robb Report, 2023-03-30
  • The amber dates to the Cretaceous period about 98 million years ago, according to the study.
    — Irene Wright, Miami Herald, 7 Aug. 2025
  • That means Cretaceous dinosaurs experienced a planet with 372 days in each year.
    — Evan Bush, NBC News, 2024-03-27
  • The ichthyosaur is a sea-dwelling dinosaur that was reportedly found during both the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
    — Joshua Hawkins, BGR, 2023-01-02
  • The dinosaur was part of the Cretaceous period, the last era of the dinosaurs, and lived between 97 million and 94 million years ago.
    — Saleen Martin, USA TODAY, 2022-08-17
  • For guide Tim Parrish, introducing anglers from across the country to these Cretaceous leftovers is a labor of love.
    — Chris Dorsey, Forbes.com, 2025-06-09
  • The study claims that bees arose in arid regions of western Gondwana during the early Cretaceous period, and as new continents formed, the insects went with them.
    — Tim Newcomb, Popular Mechanics, 2023-08-01
  • Initial hypotheses suggested those become more elaborate over time in response to the growing threat of Cretaceous predators.
    — ArsTechnica, 28 Aug. 2025
  • Lebanese amber is rich in preserved fossils, called inclusions, and dates to around 125 million years in the early Cretaceous period.
    — Kate Golembiewski, New York Times, 2023-12-04
  • Just a few million years before an asteroid killed nearly all dinosaurs on Earth, a creature resembling a small albatross with teeth flew through the Cretaceous skies.
    — Nala Rogers | Inside Science, ABC News, 2021-08-01
  • Named Kostensuchus atrox, the species lived during the Maastrichtian age at the very end of the Cretaceous period, just before the extinction of the dinosaurs.
    — Maria Azzurra Volpe, MSNBC Newsweek, 27 Aug. 2025
  • Although there is some idea of what happened to their teeth, the fate of the diverse species of Cretaceous monotremes, which were not only toothy but mostly larger than the modern platypus and echidna, remains unknown.
    — Elizabeth Rayne, Ars Technica, 2024-06-07
  • Why does the political turbulence in today’s Middle East trace back to the Cretaceous period?
    — Tunku Varadarajan, wsj.com, 2023-04-20
  • The big picture: Visitors can glimpse dinosaur tracks left about 115 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous period.
    — Tasha Tsiaperas, Axios, 2024-12-04
  • Intact fossils offer window to the past The fossils date back 66 million to 72 million years in the late Cretaceous Period.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 2024-09-09
  • Among the rocks and marine fossils, scientists have found fossilized pollen from the Late Cretaceous and Early Paleocene periods that reflects changes in the surrounding ecosystems.
    — Francisca Oboh Ikuenobe, The Conversation, 2025-05-20
  • To find answers, a team of scientists studied North America’s fossil record, focusing on the 18 million years before the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.
    — Kimberly Richardson, CNN Money, 2025-04-15
  • These teeth, collected from North America, Africa, and Europe, date back to the Late Jurassic and Late Cretaceous periods.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 5 Aug. 2025
  • Approximately 66 million years ago, a large asteroid, whose crater is named Chicxulub, slammed into the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, causing the destruction of the dinosaurs.
    — Phillip Nieto, Fox News, 2022-08-18
  • Peirosaurids are an extinct family of crocodyliforms – close cousins of today’s crocodiles – that lived only during the Cretaceous period in South America, Africa and Madagascar.
    — New Atlas, 27 Aug. 2025
  • Fossils of plesiosaurs have been dated back to the Triassic period about 250 million years ago into the Cretaceous period, before dinosaurs vanished about 65 million years ago, according to Britannica.
    — Mike Snider, USA Today, 6 Aug. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'Cretaceous.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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