KOMPAS.com – While dinosaurs are often portrayed as predators who chased anything and everything to eat, fossil evidence also shows that mammals hunted dinosaurs too.
Recently analyzed fossil evidence suggests that some dinosaurs were part of the lunch menu of early mammals.
An unusual and rare 125-year-old fossil, showing two animals, a carnivorous mammal and a larger plant-eating dinosaur, were in a deadly fight.
According to one of the study’s authors, Jordan Mallon, a paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, this is one of the first pieces of evidence to suggest mammals preyed on dinosaurs, not the other way around.
Also read: First Evidence of Dinosaurs Eating Mammals, Study Explains
“I think what’s most exciting is the fact that these new fossils show (evidence of) ecological interactions between dinosaurs and mammals going both ways. It wasn’t just the bigger dinosaurs that ate the smaller mammals,” he said.
“Sometimes, mammals are also capable of eating dinosaurs,” Mallon added.
Mammals hunted and ate dinosaurs
Quoted from IFL Science, Thursday (20/7/2023) the dinosaurs that were preyed on were the Psittacosaurus species, a group of plant-eating dinosaurs.
During his life, the dinosaur was the size of a large dog. Meanwhile, the mammal that preys on it is Repenomamus robustus, which is only the size of a weasel, quite small compared to the largest mammals alive today.
However, Repenomamus robustus was one of the largest mammalian predatory dinosaurs that lived during the Cretaceous period, when mammals did not yet dominate the Earth’s landscape.
Also read: First Evidence, Dinosaurs Had Deadly Respiratory Diseases
The mammal fossil was retrieved from China’s Liaoning Province in 2012, from an area dubbed “China’s Dinosaur Pompeii”.
The two relatively well-preserved skeletons come from an area known as the Liujitun fossil beds where numerous fossils of dinosaurs, small mammals, lizards and amphibians were buried after a volcanic eruption unleashed landslides and a flood of debris.
This fossil is indeed special because it is able to record the interaction of two animals that are fighting.
However, it is not that simple to produce such fossils.
“To maintain this kind of interaction, individuals need to be buried quickly. In the case of the animals described in the study, they were buried by violent landslides consisting mostly of volcanic ash and debris,” Mallon said.
The results of a study showing evidence that mammals millions of years ago also preyed on dinosaurs were then published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Also read: Evidence that female crocodiles can lay eggs without mating is found
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2023-07-21 12:00:00
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