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6 Responses to 'How did Crocodiles and Turtles survive dinosaur extinction?'

1. animekowz197 - September 23rd, 2009 at 6:26 am

   they were in the water.

2. Howard H - September 25th, 2009 at 7:50 am

   There are guesses but in fact no one knows. Lizards, turtles, gators and crocs, fish, some amphibians, birds, mammals, insects, fish survived, while ocean-going reptiles such as mosasaurs also went extinct as did many types of invertebrates including ammonites. No explanation of the extinction of dinosaurs would be complete without also explaining why some creatures survived.

3. Catherine - September 28th, 2009 at 5:02 am

   There’s no way of telling since we really don’t know what happened during this mass extinction event.

4. Sunil T - October 1st, 2009 at 10:08 am

   The key thing to understand is lots of other animals and plants did die out at the same time as dinosaurs.

   Basically what we know is that about 65 million years ago, all large and medium-sized land animals (which of course includes dinosaurs), and tons of marine animals (such as the marine reptiles – Plesiosaurus, etc. – as well as animals such as Ammonites), and lots of plants and small animals (including many varieties of birds for example) all seem to have died out quite suddenly. More info at

   We don’t really know why this happened, but the two main hypotheses are an asteroid impact or volcanic activity or some combination of both.

   The evidence for an asteroid impact is a layer of iridium (which comes from asteroids) found all over the world, at the right time. And craters, particularly one in Mexico, which seem to be of the right sage.

   The evidence for massive volcanic activity is in India.

   Either would have not only affected their immediate area, but caused world wide effects such as blotting out the sun causing plants to die, and changes to the climate for years afterwards, intensely acid rain etc.

   One of the main things to understand about the event is how bad it was. To kill a whole species you need to kill basically all its breeding members. To kill hundreds of species, you need to kill each of these species to this extent. So the devastation was unimaginable. Many animals and plants would simply have been wiped out because of bad luck.

   We can say that small animals probably had an advantage because they need less food.

   Unspecialized animals probably had an advantage because they could eat whatever they found rather than needing a special and impossible to find diet.

   Large predators probably had a big problem – a T-Rex which say eat Hadrosaurs would have had a big problem if all the Hadrosaurs were already dead from starvation since the plants they ate were all dead.

   Being able to burrow may have been an advantage.

   Being cold-blooded (remember many dinosaurs were bird-like and warm-blooded) may have been an advantage since you need much less food. perhaps this is why turtles, crocs, snakes and lizards survived, but dinosaurs and pterosaurs didn’t.

   Basically though we don’t know for sure.

5. Robert - October 3rd, 2009 at 2:37 am

   They were able to adapt and overcome.

6. chris b - October 4th, 2009 at 2:32 am

   For crocodylians, reproductive biology may have played a role.

   Most animals either produce lots of offspring, but spend very little effort to nourish or protect them, and others produce a small number of offspring, but expend a great deal of energy on the few offspring they have. The former will lose more offspring, but there are so many produced that at least some survive; the latter will lose fewer offspring, but there are fewer offspring to begin with.

   Crocs and gators are among the few animals that come close to doing both. A female can lay up to 60 eggs, depending on species and size, and she will also defend her nest and hatchlings. In some species, both males and females protect the young.

   In some parts of the world, formerly endangered crocodylians have made remarkable comebacks in large part for this reason. I’m thinking in particular of the American alligator and some populations (e.g. Australian) of the saltwater crocodile. Prohibitions against hunting played a role, but so did captive breeding programs that got the sustainable population up to a good size in only a few years.

   This doesn’t explain why turtles and lizards did so well across the KT boundary, but it may help explain how crocs survived.

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