The Cretaceous is usually noted for being the last portion of the "Age of Dinosaurs", but that does not mean that new kinds of dinosaurs did not appear then. It is during the Cretaceous that the first ceratopsian and pachycepalosaurid dinosaurs appeared. Also during this time, we find the first fossils of many insect groups, modern mammal and bird groups, and the first flowering plants. The breakup of the world-continent Pangea, which began to disperse during the Jurassic, continued. This led to increased regional differences in floras and faunas between the northern and southern continents. The end of the Cretaceous brought the end of many previously successful and diverse groups of organisms, such as non-avian dinosaurs and ammonites. The Cretaceous also saw the first radiation of the diatoms in the oceans (freshwater diatoms did not appear until the Miocene).
The most famous of all mass extinctions marks the end of the Cretaceous Period, about 65 million years ago. This was the great extinction in which the dinosaurs died out, except for the birds, of course. The other lineages of "marine reptiles" — the ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs — also were extinct by the end of the Cretaceous, as were the flying pterosaurs, but some, like the ichthyosaurs, were probably extinct a little before the end of the Cretaceous. Many species of foraminiferans went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, as did the ammonites. But many groups of organisms, such as flowering plants, gastropods and pelecypods (snails and clams), amphibians, lizards and snakes, crocodilians, and mammals "sailed through" the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, with few or no apparent extinctions at all. The Cretaceous is defined as the period between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago, the last period of the Mesozoic Era, following the Jurassic and ending with the extinction of the dinosaurs (except birds). By the beginning of the Cretaceous, the supercontinent Pangea was already rifting apart, and by the mid-Cretaceous, it had split into several smaller continents. This created large-scale geographic isolation, causing a divergence in evolution of all land-based life for the two new land masses. The rifting apart also generated extensive new coastlines, and a corresponding increase in the available near-shore habitat. Additionally, seasons began to grow more pronounced as the global climate became cooler.
University of California Museum of Paleontology
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mesozoic/cretaceous/cretaceous.php