This text is the translation ofan article by CTV News.
There have only been 20 other instances where the last meal of a carnivorous dinosaur was preserved. On Tuesday, a team of researchers from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and China published their findings describing their discovery of a mammalian foot inside the ribcage of a microraptor.
“At first, I didn’t believe it. There was a tiny rodent-like mammalian foot about a centimeter long perfectly preserved inside a microraptor skeleton. These findings are the only strong evidence we have about the food consumption of these long-extinct animals – and they are exceptionally rare,” study co-author Hans Larsson of McGill University said in a statement. Press release .
Microraptors were feathered dinosaurs that lived during the early Cretaceous around 120-125 million years ago. They were about the size of a crow, and the first specimens were discovered in China in the early 2000s.
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“What’s incredible is that, like your house cat, which was about the same size, the microraptor would have been an animal that would have been easy to cohabit with, but would have been a terror if it came out, because it would have chased away everything from the birds at your feeder to the mice in your hedge or the fish in your pond,” said Alex Dececchi of Mount Marty College, another co-author of the study.
It is not known to which species of mammal the foot once belonged. The authors note that his measurements were slim, similar to the rodent-like eomaia and sinodelphys species that lived around this period. However, the bony proportions suggest that this creature may have been a terrestrial species, unlike the tree-climbing eomaia and sinodelphys.
It’s also unclear if this microraptor’s last meal was scavenged or hunted. While the size of the mammal, which was about as big as a mouse, suggests it could have been preyed upon, the researchers note that it’s quite common for carnivores like microraptors to indulge both hunting and predation.
Previous research on the microraptor has already established that the creature’s diet likely included birds, lizards, and fish.
“This new finding adds a small mammal to their diet, suggesting that these dinosaurs were opportunistic, not picky eaters,” Larsson said.
The researchers also note that this finding adds to the hypothesis that the microraptor was a generalist carnivore. Generalist carnivores, such as foxes and crows, play an important stabilizing role in ecosystems, as they can eat a wide variety of species depending on which populations are most abundant.
“Knowing that the microraptor was a generalist carnivore gives new insight into how ancient ecosystems functioned and possible insight into the success of these small, feathered dinosaurs,” Larsson explained.