I'm not trying to beat a dead horse but...how come the alligators and crocodiles made it but the rest of the dinosaurs didn't?
Natural selection
1: They are amphibious. They need little air and can stay underwater for extended periods. They can also relax near the surface, barely exposing themselves with just their nostrils and eyes showing.
2: Wide diet. Crocodiles can and will eat just about anything they can take down. As the larger and more dangerous dinosaurs died off, their main land-based prey became the smaller, adaptable mammals that were beginning to become commonplace.
3: Strong immune system. Crocodiles are like bats in how well they can resist disease. The extinction event killed off the plentiful food that the large dinosaurs needed and as they starved they also fell to disease.
4: Efficient metabolism. Crocodiles don’t need a lot of food and can go long periods without a large meal, whereas the large, continuously growing dinosaurs had to eat until they could not find enough food to sustain their size (a common problem amongst the largest kinds of herbivores)
5: They’re tough and mean. As large predatory dinosaurs died off, crocodiles had less competition and moved up the food chain a bit.
6: Large litters. Crocodiles lay a lot of eggs and the babies mature fairly quickly. Many dinosaurs took years to develop into proper adults.
7: Hibernation. The extinction event and subsequent Ice Age caused radical weather changes with huge temperature drops that most dinosaurs would not have been able to survive. Crocodiles, however, can go dormant in the cold if they find a safe spot to hide out, and simply come out again when it’s warm.
