Caught: A mammal with teeth found submerged in a giant dinosaur

A new stone described this week captures two linked animals that were caught in a life-or-death battle before they were all buried in a volcanic eruption. Published in Scientific Reports this Tuesday, the fossils don’t capture one dinosaur attacking another — but, in this case, the predator is a small animal called Let’s call him strong again and it died with its teeth hitting the grass eater Psittacosaurus lujiatunensisa dinosaur three times its size.

What’s in the intestines to a Let’s repeat Fossils described in 2005 confirm that these same mammals ate small and very small animals. Psittacosaurus. But the fascinating fossils unearthed today are the first evidence of any Cretaceous animal attacking a giant dinosaur. It’s a fascinating reflection of ancient behavior, challenging previous stereotypes of predators/predators millions of years ago.

The last fight

These two types of artifacts could not be more different. Psittacosaurus is a bipedal ceratopsian dinosaur—an early relative of dinosaurs such as Triceratops—with a large lip-like snout and pointed tail tips. This was a cattle animal, and is the most common fossil in the Lujiatun Member of the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of China. This especially Psittacosaurus he was about 6.5-10 years old when he died.

Let’s call him strong again it was a primitive mammal about the size and weight of the Virginia opossum. His left hand is seen grasping the dinosaur’s lower jaw, and the hind legs of the two animals are joined together.. Because Let’s repeat died by biting a dinosaur, the authors could not use his teeth to determine his age. However, they thought he was almost a grown man based on his long, fused bones. This small predator weighed 1.42–3.43 kg (about three to seven lbs), but its meat was 6–10.6 kg (13–23 lbs).

Two of them let’s repeat The ribs may have been broken, but whether this happened in his fight with the dinosaur or through the process of fossilization is unknown.

These interesting fossils were found in the Lujiatun member of the aforementioned Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of China in 2012 by a local farmer. It is an area known as “Chinese Pompeii,” which fascinates Italian archeology because of its abundance of beautiful flora and fauna preserved by volcanic eruptions.

The authors show that dinosaurs and mammals were quickly defeated by lahars – “volcanic debris flows, which occur after eruptions, using hydraulic reworking of deposited ash,” co-author Jordan Mallon explained in an email to Ars.

But wouldn’t such waste not only affect the animal’s habitat but also remove it from where it died? Even so, wouldn’t the animals see something big and dangerous to run towards? Not according to 2007 paper describe a group of children Psittacosauruses preserved in the same way and from the same rock formations in China.

“These kinds of things are still going on today and they can bury entire communities very quickly,” Mallon said. “We know other dinosaurs from the Lujiatun beds, incl sleep Mei longwhich shows that such animals were not [awakened] and waste flow. In the case of the fossils described above, I would argue that animals were not [too] too busy to see the mud that’s coming.”