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Science

Mammals Preyed on Dinosaurs? 42

Posted by michael from the tastes-like-chicken dept.
Anonymous Howard writes "Nature is just one of many sites reporting that 130 million-year-old fossils unearthed in China suggest that contrary to conventional wisdom, some early mammals were large enough to prey on dinosaurs. Evidence? How about the fossil of a large badger-like animal with the bones of an entire baby dino in its gut?"
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Mammals Preyed on Dinosaurs? More

Mammals Preyed on Dinosaurs?

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  • Hmm (Score:2, Funny)

    by RaboKrabekian ( 461040 )
    Badgers?! We don't need no stinking badgers!

  • Blurb a little misleading... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mOoZik ( 698544 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @01:02PM (#11350188) Homepage
    ..as it makes it seem the mammals were larger than the dinosaurs people typically think of, like the T-Rex or others, who are very, very large. But according to New Scientist [newscientist.com], they were only around a meter long (and smaller) and would prey on very small dinos.

  • If Nature is the primary source (where the research results were published) is it really "one of many sites?" I'm being really picky here, but there's a huge difference between an article written by the people who dug up the fossils and an article written by someone who simply read about it. Of course, usually, the primary source is not even mentioned here, so I guess I can't complain too much.

  • Alternate interpretation (Score:2, Interesting)

    by crow ( 16139 )
    So the mammal died, and the dinosaur was feeding on it, but died while inside it. Or it crawled inside the carcass after some other predator had fed on it, possibly simply for warmth (explaining it if it were a vegetarian).

    Granted, the first interpretation is probably correct, but they need to have reasons for rejecting the alternatives.
    • If you R one of TFAs, you find that the dino was chopped up into chunks (ie chewed). I doubt if it crawled into the dead mammal in that condition.
    • But I thought they said the thing was a carnivore because of the teeth... this is a job for CSI...
    • I don't think they need to explain. It's quite obvious that it being eaten is the simplest explanation. You said yourself the first interpretation is probably correct - so the reasons for rejecting the others are clear to everyone.

      What instead should be asked is how you can base a new cultural tendency (mammals ate dinosours) to just a single piece of evidence. Perhaps this mammal was unusual in its eating habits. Perhaps starvation led it to steal food it would never otherwise consider. Perhaps it i

  • I think archeologists would be better off not making assumptions in the absense of proof, because you can't prove a negative.
    • Negative vs positive is just a quality of an assertion, like like green and purple are colors. Besides, any "negative" can be reworded into a "positive", which means that you can equally prove either.
  • There's a communist country/[verb]s YOU joke in there somewhere...
    • Would it be one of the following?

      In Communist Russia, Dinosaurs eat YOU!
      In Communist Russia, Mammals eat YOU!
      In Communist Russia, Mammals eat DINOSAURS!
      In Communist Russia, Dinosaurs eat MAMMALS!
  • Yeah, go mammals! We rawk! Suck it, dino-chumps!

    Woot! Woot! Representin' in the Mesozoic!
  • There was a story on NPR [npr.org] about this in the morning and there is an audio link there, plus you can click on the photo of the fossil so that you get an enlarged version than the one available at the Nature link.

    I have not read any of the articles on this, but when I heard the NPR story, I wondered what evidence they had against it simply being a scavenger along the lines of a modern hyena?

    • Evidence? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Engineer-Poet ( 795260 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @03:46PM (#11352467) Homepage Journal
      Over at Pharyngula [pharyngula.org] the claim is that the tooth structure and muscle attachments on the jaw indicate the strength that is characteristic of a carnivore, not a scavenger.

    • Re:bigger photo (Score:3, Informative)

      by flyingsquid ( 813711 )
      I have not read any of the articles on this, but when I heard the NPR story, I wondered what evidence they had against it simply being a scavenger along the lines of a modern hyena?

      Well... um... because that wouldn't be as cool.

      Seriously, I'm a paleontologist and that's the best answer I've got. I can't think of any good way you could rule out the idea that it just picked up some already dead dinosaur, but the scientists probably chose to downplay that possibility since it wouldn't generate as much media

    • The mysterious "mammal" is actually a triconodont . They differ from eutherians (placental mammals) which are what we usually think of as "modern" mammals. Aside from toothy traits, these creatures , like marsupials, did not have a closed pelvis. Closing the pelvis changes the reproductive behavior by adding the eutherian trait of estrus. This makes the female mate with every ovulation. Then there is ambulation. Think of a duck. A duck has an open, "U"-shaped pelvis so it
  • Years ago, I watched a television show where proto-humans ate dinosaurs in the form of brontoburgers and giant slabs of ribs.

    They also had foot powered cars, and cameras with woodpecker-like dinosaurs carving images into stone tablets.

  • Just another red herring thrown out by our great and merciful God 6000 years ago in order to tempt his creatures into eternal damnation for creating heretical theories about the history of the world based on the evidence he planted all around them. Nothing to see here. Move along.

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