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WASHINGTON: Whereas there may be little doubt that many a Mesozoic mammal turned a meal for a dinosaur, it might come as a shock to study that some mammals additionally dined on dinos.
A dramatic fossil unearthed in northeastern China reveals a pugnacious badger-like mammal within the act of attacking a plant-eating dinosaur, mounting its prey and sinking its tooth into its sufferer’s ribs about 125 million years in the past, scientists stated on Tuesday.
Courting to the Cretaceous Interval, it reveals the four-legged mammal Repenomamus robustus – the scale of a home cat – ferociously entangled with the beaked two-legged dinosaur Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis – as huge as a medium-sized canine. The scientists suspect they had been out of the blue engulfed in a volcanic mudflow and buried alive throughout mortal fight.
“Dinosaurs practically at all times outsized their mammal contemporaries, so conventional perception has been that their interactions had been unilateral – the larger dinosaurs at all times ate the smaller mammals,” stated palaeobiologist Jordan Mallon of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, who helped lead the research printed within the journal Scientific Stories.
“Right here, we’ve got good proof for a smaller mammal preying on a bigger dinosaur, which isn’t one thing we’d have guessed with out this fossil,” Mallon added.
Most mammals in the course of the Mesozoic Period, the age of dinosaurs, had been shrew-sized bit gamers within the bigger theatre of life, doing effectively to keep away from turning into another person’s lunch. Repenomamus reveals a minimum of some mammals gave pretty much as good as they received.
“I believe what’s key right here is that Mesozoic meals webs had been extra advanced than we had imagined,” Mallon stated.
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