Maybe it hit water, and not land...........which would explain Noah's ark and floods................but who knows, and the ocean's floor does move.......

Fish[edit]

There are substantial fossil records of jawed fishes across the K–Pg boundary, which provides good evidence of extinction patterns of these classes of marine vertebrates. Within cartilaginous fish, approximately 80% of the sharks, rays, andskates families survived the extinction event,^[23] and more than 90% of teleost fish (bony fish) families survived.^[48] There is evidence of a mass kill of bony fishes at a fossil site immediately above the K–Pg boundary layer on Seymour Islandnear Antarctica, apparently precipitated by the K–Pg extinction event.^[49] However, the marine and freshwater environments of fishes mitigated environmental effects of the extinction event.^[50]

Terrestrial invertebrates[edit]

Insect damage to the fossilized leaves of flowering plants from fourteen sites in North America were used as a proxy for insect diversity across the K–Pg boundary and analyzed to determine the rate of extinction. Researchers found that Cretaceous sites, prior to the extinction event, had rich plant and insect-feeding diversity. However, during the early Paleocene, flora were relatively diverse with little predation from insects, even 1.7 million years after the extinction event.^[51][52]

Terrestrial plants[edit]

There is overwhelming evidence of global disruption of plant communities at the K–Pg boundary.^{[13][13][53][54]} Extinctions are seen both in studies of fossil pollen, and fossil leaves.^[13] In North America, the data suggest massive devastation and mass extinction of plants at the K–Pg boundary sections, although there were substantial megafloral changes before the boundary.^[13][55] In North America, approximately 57% of plant species became extinct. In high southern hemisphere latitudes, such as New Zealand and Antarctica the mass die-off of flora caused no significant turnover in species, but dramatic and short-term changes in the relative abundance of plant groups.^[51][56] In some regions, Paleocene recovery of plants began with recolonizations by fern species, represented as a fern spike in the geologic record; this same pattern of fern recolonization was observed after the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.^[57] However the patterns of recovery were quite variable. Different fern species were responsible for the fern spike in different areas, and in some regions, no fern spike is evident.^{[citation needed]}

Due to the wholesale destruction of plants at the K–Pg boundary there was a proliferation of saprotrophic organisms such as fungi that do not require photosynthesis and use nutrients from decaying vegetation. The dominance of fungal species lasted only a few years while the atmosphere cleared and there was plenty of organic matter to feed on. Once the atmosphere cleared, photosynthetic organisms like ferns and other plants returned.^[58] Polyploidy appears to have enhanced the ability of flowering plants to survive the extinction, probably because the additional copies of the genome such plants possessed allowed them to more readily adapt to the rapidly changing environmental conditions that followed the impact.^[59]

Amphibians[edit]

There is limited evidence for extinction of amphibians at the K–Pg boundary. A study of fossil vertebrates across the K–Pg boundary in Montana concluded that no species of amphibian became extinct.^[60] Yet there are several species of Maastrichtian amphibian, not included as part of this study, which are unknown from the Paleocene. These include the frog Theatonius lancensis ^[61] and the albanerpetontid Albanerpeton galaktion;^[62] therefore some amphibians do seem to have become extinct at the boundary. The relatively low levels of extinction seen among amphibians probably reflect the low extinction rates seen in freshwater animals.^[63]

Non-archosaur reptiles[edit]

Large marine reptiles such asmosasaurs and plesiosaurs died out by the end of the Cretaceous.

The two living non-archosaurian reptile taxa, testudines (turtles) and lepidosaurs (snakes, lizards, and amphisbaenians (worm lizards)), along with choristoderes (semi-aquatic archosauromorphs that died out in the early Miocene), survived through the K–Pg boundary.^[23] Over 80% of Cretaceous turtle species passed through the K–Pg boundary. Additionally, all six turtle families in existence at the end of the Cretaceous survived into the Paleogene and are represented by current species.^[64] Living lepidosaurs include Rhynchocephalia (tuataras) and Squamata. The Rhynchocephalia were a widespread and relatively successful group of lepidosaurs in the early Mesozoic, but began to decline by the mid-Cretaceous. They are represented today by a single genus located exclusively in New Zealand.^[65]

The order Squamata, which is represented today by lizards, snakes, and amphisbaenians, radiated into various ecological niches during the Jurassic and were successful throughout the Cretaceous. They survived through the K–Pg boundary and are currently the most successful and diverse group of living reptiles with more than 6,000 extant species. No known family of terrestrial squamates became extinct at the boundary, and fossil evidence indicates they did not suffer any significant decline in numbers. Their small size, adaptable metabolism, and ability to move to more favorable habitats were key factors in their survivability during the late Cretaceous and early Paleocene.^[23][64] Giant non-archosaurian aquatic reptiles such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, which were the top marine predators of their time, became extinct by the end of the Cretaceous.^[66][67]