2023-07-18 17:28:47
The fossil shows a badger-like creature devouring a small dinosaur with its beak, their skeletons intertwined. The find comes from a site known as “China’s Pompeii”, where mud and debris from ancient volcanoes buried the creatures in place.
“This appears to be a prehistoric hunt, captured in stone, like a frozen image,” University of Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Brusatte, who was not involved in the study, said in an email.
The fossil, described in the journal Scientific Reports on Tuesday, shows two creatures dating to around 125 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period.
Although the mammal was much smaller, researchers believe it was attacking the dinosaur when they were both trapped in the volcanic flow, according to study author Jordan Mallon, a paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature. . The mammal is perched on top of the dinosaur, its paws gripping the reptile’s jaw and a hind limb while its teeth dip into the rib cage.
“I’ve never seen a fossil like this before,” Mallon said.
It had previously been proposed that mammals fed on dinosaur meat: another fossil showed that a mammal had died with dinosaur remains in its stomach.
But this new finding also suggests that mammals could have hunted dinosaurs many times their size and not just fed on those that were already dead, Mallon explained.
“It upsets the old story,” Brusatte said. “We used to think of the Age of Dinosaurs as a time when dinosaurs ruled the world and small mammals lurked in the shadows.”
The study authors acknowledged that there had been a few known false fossil finds in this region of the world, which Mallon said was a concern when they began their research. But after preparing the skeletons themselves and analyzing the rock samples, he said they were confident the fossil – which was discovered by a farmer in 2012 – was genuine and they would welcome other scientists to study the fossil as well.
The mammal in the fossil duo is the meat-eating, domestic cat-sized Repenomamus robustus, Mallon said. The dinosaur – Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis – was about the size of a medium-sized dog with a parrot-like beak.
This species was herbivorous, but other dinosaurs were carnivores or ate both. Ultimately, dinosaurs probably ate mammals even more often than the other way around, Mallon said.
“And yet we now know that mammals were able to fight back, at least sometimes,” he added.
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