lujiatunensis weighed about three times that, at 23.4 pounds. The research team estimated that at their time of death, the badger-like mammal weighed about 7.5 pounds, while P. In this case, I think there is not enough evidence to say with full confidence the mammal was the predator caught in the act of subduing its prey.” “The awkward interlocking legs between the two suggests both were dead or tumbled while being buried. “The mammal’s hand inside the mouth of the dinosaur, which had a high bite force, suggests at least the dinosaur was dead at the time of burial, or it would have easily sliced off the hand,” Hans Larsson, a paleontologist at McGill University, tells New Scientist’s Chen Ly. “What’s new here is even a fully grown Psittacosaurus wasn’t necessarily safe from these smaller mammalian predators.”īut not all researchers agree with the predation interpretation. “We already knew that mammals did occasionally prey on at least baby dinosaurs,” Jordan Mallon, a study co-author and paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, tells NPR. And the lack of tooth marks on the bones of the dinosaur suggests the mammal was actively hunting-not merely scavenging-its meal. They suggest the positioning of the mammal above the dinosaur, its teeth chomping down on the reptile’s ribcage and its paw clutching the dinosaur’s beak are all signs that indicate predation. They’re cowering in the darkness at night, just trying to avoid being eaten.”īut in a new paper published Tuesday in Scientific Reports, researchers upend that traditional view. ![]() “We’ve always had this picture of mammals as the literal underdogs,” Elsa Panciroli, a paleontologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, tells NPR’s Ari Daniel. The two animals’ fight was immortalized when a nearby volcanic eruption entombed them in a fast-moving wave of ash and mud. The 125-million-year-old bones, uncovered in 2012, consist of a cat-sized creature called Repenomamus robustus, whose skeleton is entangled in a final tussle with a beaked dinosaur known as Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis. A remarkably well-preserved fossil discovered in China suggests that millions of years ago, some mammals actively hunted dinosaurs that were several times their size.
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