The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Mass extinction of lizards and snakes at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary
Open accessAbstract
The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary is marked by a major mass extinction, yet this event is thought to have had little effect on the diversity of lizards and snakes (Squamata). A revision of fossil squamates from the Maastrichtian and Paleocene of North America shows that lizards and snakes suffered a devastating mass extinction coinciding with the Chicxulub asteroid impact. Species-level extinction was 83%, and the K-Pg event resulted in the elimination of many lizard groups and a dramatic decrease in morphological disparity. Survival was associated with small body size and perhaps large geographic range. The recovery was prolonged; diversity did not approach Cretaceous levels until 10 My after the extinction, and resulted in a dramatic change in faunal composition. The squamate fossil record shows that the end-Cretaceous mass extinction was far more severe than previously believed, and underscores the role played by mass extinctions in driving diversification.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Benson, R. B. J., Campione, N. E., Carrano, M. T., Mannion, P. D., Sullivan, C., Upchurch, P., & Evans, D. C. (2014) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001853 · Cited by 457
Asteroid impact, not volcanism, caused the end-Cretaceous dinosaur extinction
Chiarenza, A. A., Farnsworth, A., Mannion, P. D., Lunt, D. J., Valdes, P. J., Morgan, J. V., & Allison, P. A. (2020) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2006087117 · Cited by 228
Explosive diversification of marine fishes at the Cretaceous–Palaeogene boundary
Alfaro, M. E., Faircloth, B. C., Harrington, R. C., Sorenson, L., Friedman, M., Thacker, C. E., Oliveros, C. H., Černý, D., & Near, T. J. (2018) · Nature Ecology & Evolution · doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0494-6 · Cited by 206
Vertebrate biodiversity losses point to a sixth mass extinction
McCallum, M. L. (2015) · Biodiversity and Conservation · doi:10.1007/s10531-015-0940-6 · Cited by 163
Prolonged morphological expansion of spiny-rayed fishes following the end-Cretaceous
Ghezelayagh, A., Harrington, R. C., Burress, E. D., Campbell, M. A., Buckner, J. C., Chakrabarty, P., Glass, J. R., McCraney, W. T., Unmack, P. J., Thacker, C. E., et al. (2022) · Nature Ecology & Evolution · doi:10.1038/s41559-022-01801-3 · Cited by 127
Metadata
- Authors
- Longrich, N. R., Bhullar, B.-A. S., & Gauthier, J. A.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2012-12-10
- Volume
- 109
- Issue
- 52
- Pages
- 21396-21401
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W2003820601
- Cited by
- 220
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 8.61
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Mass extinction of lizards and snakes at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.1211526110
- The paper
- Longrich, N. R., Bhullar, B.-A. S., & Gauthier, J. A. (2012). Mass extinction of lizards and snakes at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211526110
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
