Scientists find fossil proving 'deadly battle' that took place 125 million years ago (photo)
A small badger-like mammal and a baby bipedal dinosaur clashed in a deadly battle 125 million years ago when they were both killed by a volcanic mudslide. The bones of the animals are perfectly preserved thanks to the volcanic rock.
According to Live Science, the fossil was found in the Liujitun Fossil Beds in China's Liaoning Province in 2012. This area has been called "China's dinosaur Pompeii" because volcanic mudflows in the mid-Mesozoic era quickly covered the area.
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It is noted that the stone slab contained the skeletons of two species: Repenomamus robustus, an extinct badger-like creature that was one of the largest living mammals at the time and a dinosaur from the Psittacosaurus genus, a group of herbivorous horned dinosaurs with a bird's beak and long threads at the ends of their tails.
The length of the mammal from nose to tail was about 47 centimeters and the length of the dinosaur was about 120 cm. Based on the size of past fossils, this suggests that both creatures were not fully grown.
The researchers described the "dueling" animals in a new article published on July 18 in the Scientific Reports journal.
They found that the small mammal probably won the fight, apparently delivering a fatal blow to the larger dinosaur before they were both buried in the volcano's incandescent hot lava.
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"The dinosaur is lying on its front, with its hind limbs bent on both sides of its body and its neck and tail twisted to the left," the study says. The mammal is lying on the left side of the dinosaur and bends to the right. The left front paw of R. robustus also clutches the dinosaur's lower jaw, while the mammal's left hind paw appears to be clutching the dinosaur's left shin, the scientists added.
The most compelling evidence that R. robustus was the winner is that the mammal's teeth stuck in the dinosaur's chest when the animals died.
The new discovery overturns what researchers have long assumed about dinosaurs and mammals, which is that extinct reptiles mostly hunted mammals, not the other way around," study co-author Jordan Mallon, a paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Natural History in Ottawa, said in a statement. "This is one of the first proofs of true mammalian predatory behavior on dinosaurs," he added.
As a reminder, scientists have discovered that prehistoric mammals hunted dinosaurs three times their size.
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