To describe the remarkable find, Han teamed up with colleagues in Canada. The new study’s fossilized brawl was uncovered in 2012 by a local farmer and was soon acquired by Gang Han, a paleontologist at China’s Hainan Vocational University of Science and Technology. This preserved many of the region’s prehistoric inhabitants in three dimensions, offering paleontologists detailed snapshots of this ancient ecosystem. The new find hails from a fossil-rich site in China’s Liaoning Province, in an area sometimes called the “Chinese Pompeii.” During the Early Cretaceous, the area’s volatile volcanoes buried myriad creatures, including feathered dinosaurs and early tyrannosaurs, in debris. Entangled Psittacosaurus and Repenomamus skeletons. The scale bar equals 10 centimeters ( top). A life reconstruction shows Psittacosaurus being attacked by Repenomamus 125 million years ago ( bottom). Credit: Gang Han ( top) Michael Skrepnick ( bottom) More fossils were needed, however, for scientists to determine whether Repenomamus actively hunted larger dinosaurs or just snacked on defenseless baby dinos. In 2005 researchers examining a Repenomamus fossil discovered the tiny bones of a young Psittacosaurus, an early relative of herbivores such as Triceratops, lodged in the mammal’s stomach. Repenomamus’s taste for dinosaur flesh is not entirely surprising. It tipped the scale at around 10 pounds and belonged to a now extinct family of carnivorous mammals that experienced their heyday during the Early Cretaceous. This made Repenomamus robustus a mammalian giant for its day. Even the largest Mesozoic mammals maxed out at the size of a badger. Until an asteroid strike doomed the nonavian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, most mammals were pint-sized critters that ate insects and seeds and scurried in the shadow of supersized reptiles. Mammals and dinos have rarely been on an even playing field, however. Since the Triassic period 230 million years ago, mammals have lived alongside dinosaurs-and later with their descendants, birds. “It’s like watching the coyote catch the roadrunner.” “You would surely assume that it was the dinosaur eating the mammal, but the roles are reversed,” says Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the new study. The remarkable fossil, described Tuesday in Scientific Reports, offers researchers the first glimpse of a Mesozoic mammal actively hunting a much larger dinosaur. The entwined animals were buried mid-melee by a flow of volcanic debris from a nearby eruption that preserved both predator and prey in exquisite detail. This duel was ultimately doomed for both mammal and dinosaur. And the Repenomamus was sinking its teeth into the reptile’s ribcage. As the animals grappled, one of the mammal’s hind legs was pinned below the dinosaur as its front paw grasped the dinosaur’s beak. During the Cretaceous period 125 million years ago, a ravenous Repenomamus, an ancient mammal the size of an opossum, pounced on an unsuspecting Psittacosaurus-an herbivorous dinosaur more than three times its size.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |