I can fill you in on most of the developments that are really important in a few sentences; and you'll find good search terms in them, which will probably help you out as much as good references.
The Cretaceous dinosaurs included at least one suborder, the Therapoda, many of which were feathered and warm-blooded, with hollow bones and wishbones. The whole family Velociraptor and Deinonychus came from is part of this suborder, and that's where the birds evolved from, if we've got the cladistics right. There's a Megaraptor out there for you to discover. T. Rex has some competition; it's called Spinosaurus, and it was actually bigger than the "king of the tyrant lizards."
A lot of the fossil evidence was found in China, since things started to open up over there. Initially the woos went nutz, and we had speculations that all of the dinosaurs were feathered and warm-blooded; this is obvious dreck. But for sure some of them were. And they were the gnarliest ones; they think these things hunted in packs, and could take down just about anything they met. Their big weapon is a disembowelling claw on each hind foot that sticks out above the toes. Velociraptor itself is considerably smaller than the monsters in Jurassic Park (which, since it had Velociraptor in it really should have been called "Cretaceous Park," among numerous other egregious technical faults), about the size of a turkey.
Someone found a T. Rex thighbone with some intact flesh inside (after a hundred million years or so!) and they're sequencing the DNA, or have recently finished. I haven't seen the results yet. I'll go googling one time when I'm bored.
The therapods are the main most interesting part, because of the connection to the birds. There are folks who state unequivocally that birds are therapods, the last living dinosaurs. The DNA sequencing I mentioned above could throw some light on this subject.
The Chixulub crater, which is half on land in the North of the Yucatan peninsula and half in the Caribbean, is the most likely cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs. This crater was discovered because the entire area is covered with shatter quartz and tektites, and is the site of a huge magnetic anomaly. Geophysicists believe that it was created by a 10km asteroid impact, about 65 MYA. It's 200km wide, making it one of the largest positively identified impact features on Earth. The sky rained fire on the day it came down, and everything bigger than a rabbit died. They've found a layer of iridium-contaminated rock that dates just about then just about everywhere on Earth they've looked, and there are some folks who have found extensive evidence of a layer of charcoal, though that evidence is sketchier. They're still waiting for the older generation of paleontologists to die off before the consensus solidifies in favor of this. This was probably either just a wild idea or not even conceived of when you were looking at things.
Happy birthday. Enjoy. Hopefully someone who's been reading literature or who surfs looking for this stuff will give you some more to chew on.
Superceded even in my own day, but still more insightful than the creationist version of events.
