Fossil of Ant-Eating Dinosaur Discovered In China 64
thomst writes "Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience reports that a farmer in southern Henan Province in China has dug up the first known ant-eating dinosaur, a half-meter-long theropod (the dinosaur family to which T. Rex belongs), whose fossilized remains were described as 'fairly intact'. The 83- to 89-million-year-old pygmy dinosaur has been named named Xixianykus zhangi by Xig Xu, De-you Wang, Corwin Sullivan, David Hone, Feng-lu Han, Rong-hao Yan, and Fu-ming Du, whose paper on the critter, A basal parvicursorine (Theropoda: Alvarezsauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of China, was published in the March 29 issue of Zootaxa (the abstract is available in PDF format for free, the full article is paywall-protected.)"
Re:Ant eating dinosaur? (Score:5, Informative)
Ancestral Insects are much, much older than dinosaurs, and have a much more diverse and interesting history. Unfortunately, as in the modern era, if it's not a vertebrate it doesn't have the national-geographic wow factor.
Re:Ant-eating? or Termite eating? (Score:1, Informative)
Slow down son, not eating ants [wikipedia.org]? I guess by 30k ants per day they mean termites. Extant means present *today* btw.
Re:I doubt it's been slashdotted... (Score:4, Informative)
No, Yahoo is blocking direct access to the print version of the article. Remove "print" from the end of the URL and it will work.
U can haz link (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I for one welcome our new insect eating overlor (Score:3, Informative)
This is biology we're talking about, "all" almost never holds. Most insect diversity then (like now) was probably under 1cm in size.
Re:Ant eating dinosaur? (Score:4, Informative)
he could be dumb white trailer trash.
The proper name is "cracker".
Or, he might not be dumb at all, and simply an unfortunate victim of the American public school system.
I believe the proper terminology for that is "functionally idiotic". Not dumb, but you can't tell the difference.
Re:Ant-eating? or Termite eating? (Score:3, Informative)
He's probably thinking of the aardvark, numbat, echidna, or pangolin, which are all colloquially known as "anteaters" but don't eat ants and aren't in the same family.
To be fair, anteaters do eat mostly termites, not ants.
Check your /. settings (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, then another thing you probably didn't know (Score:4, Informative)