They are still around because when the giant meteor fell to earth, it generated a lot of energy that is turned into heat. There was so much heat it melted a big chunk of rock at the sea floor and threw the molten rock into the atmosphere. Computer modeling suggests that the upper atmosphere was about 2700 deg. F, but since heat rises, temperature was a lot lower at ground level, but still hot enough that it killed not just the dinosaurs, but practically any animal that could not hide underground or in the water.
Dinosaurs, a group of ancient birds called enantiornithine (or opposite) birds (the dominant land birds or the Mesozoic), and many mammals (North American and Eurasian marsupials for example) could not escape the heat and were completely wiped out because they are too big to hide underground, and they don't live in or near the water.
Animals that survived by hiding underground include placental shrews, marsupial shrews, lizards, snakes, frogs, salamanders, and many invertebrates (e.g. sow bugs). Since heat rises, just a few inches underground the animals are safe even during a modern day forest fire. Above ground, everything is burned. Besides the heat there were also world wide forest fires when the molten rock fell back down to earth.
Some animals escaped by being in the water. These include frogs, salamanders, fish, turtles, crocodiles and alligators, the duck-billed platypus (the echidna only evolved recently from the platypus), insects with aquatic larvae, and the ornithurine birds. The ornithurine birds were shorebirds, similar in lifestyle to the living sea gulls and sandpipers. They spend a lot of time in or near the water, so they were able to survive the heat, since it takes a lot of heat to raise the temperature of water just 1 degree. The air just above the water may be cool enough not to scorch the linings of the lungs. Practically all living birds evolved from the shorebirds that survived the mass extinction, with a few exceptions, such as the tinamous and the ostrich. the ostrich is a good swimmer as well, so it is possible its ancestor was also living near the water.
They adapted
Because of Lacoste.
They adapted. If you want to survive you have to adapt.
How come crocodiles walked the earth with the dinosaurs but still exist, woudnt they of been wiped out with the dinousours?
