T-rex gets taken out. Well this opened up an ecological niche, that allowed our mammal ancestors to evolve to something more ambitious than a rodent and out comes the primates and among the primates we have people.
This pressure was probably a consequence of competition to fill the new ecological niches opened up by an ability to recognise sweet things as both edible and nutritious.
For example, some plants may be relying on a certain amount of rainfall, or an animal may feed exclusively on one species, they have a specialized ecological niche.
Filling ecological niches once occupied by dinosaurs, mammals came to dominate the dry grasslands and forests of the Eocene and beyond, but no species may have been more threatening than humankind.
And what adaptive radiation is is: an evolutionary process by which a parent species rapidly undergoes changes resulting in various new speciesin order to fill multiple ecological niches.
It has been populated with red deer and also semi-feral cattle and ponies intended to fill ecological niches occupied by long extinct our rocks and tarpons.
These larger sizes allowed pterosaurs to conquer ecological niches that weren't available to birds, like flying long distances over the open ocean in search of food.
During the Triassic as dinosaurs were evolving to fill large bodied ecological niches on land the other amniote groups were evolving to fill the sea and the air.
Over the last 50 to 60 million years, they diversified into eight different families, five of which still have living members, and they filled a huge variety of ecological niches.