Fossil shows mammal sinking teeth into dinosaur
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Like assuming that based on some skeletons found under a volcanic ash flow that the normal behavior of humans was running with your hands in the air and screaming really loudly.
I appreciate if they want to posit ideas, but so often there’s this tone of absoluteness to them.
I wonder if part of it is just the desire to make one’s discipline more exciting.
Surely they exist, and this could be one of them, but until we find evidence to the contrary our best guess should be that this was a common behavior.
I'm pretty sure my little dog would do something similar if she encountered a wild boar in the forest. I'm quite sure that if I were successfully chased down by a velociraptor, I would not just lay down and wait to be eaten.
> Researchers said the discovery challenged a long-held view of early mammals as “fodder” for dinosaurs.
I don't really get how that "challenges" any view at all. As if dinosaurs never got bitten nor scratched by stuff they were trying to eat. And with an erupting volcano nearby, I'd probably fight harder just for the hell of it and to mess with the palaeontologists.
There's a smaller predator, larger prey phenomenon I find fascinating, and it has to do with how a modern dinosaur -- the peregrine falcon -- takes its prey. It literally falcon-punches its victim -- diving at high speed to strike with a closed talon. It can make a meal of a bird about twice its size this way, though usually it feeds on pigeons, other small birds, and the occasional small reptile or mammal.
It’s a series of “hops.”
As for nasty small critters, look at pretty much anything in the mustelid (weasel) family. Pound for pound, the nastiest critters on Earth.
Wolverines have been known to hunt caribou.
And, of course, we have the honey badger: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg
Anyone says they have a strong bite doesn't pay attention to other animals with similar jaws. Crocodiles for example can do 3700 PSI but is supported by a rigid neck and doesn't have to deal with the weight to support its jaws. This is also support by a jaw snapping mechanism. You could effectively hold a crocodiles mouth shut with no force at all. This would say the Jarasic Park ones had 1000 PSI, but real life ones 100 PSI and the teeth did all the work. Yeah I think humans have a stronger jaw, further the mouth extends from the jaw the more muscle it needs.
Looked up a caiman bite force it about 400 PSI. There are some that can do more but it makes sense crocodile bite force is how much it can do with its weight. Slightly larger than a chicken Dino isn't going to compete with a caiman.
"The victim of its attack was Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis, a bipedal, plant-eating beaked dinosaur"
It doesnt fully exclude the "random attack" behaviour, but makes it more unlikely.
Are horses and cows herbivores or carnivores? You'll probably say they're herbivores, but there are plenty of videos of them eating small animals (like baby chicks).
The downstream effects of a post-truth post-trust era.
(And of course I pretty immediately felt the voting feedback on why. So much pride in a dictatorship; that is also weird.)
All this era has shown us, is that we should never have been relying on trust in anything even close to science. Trusting people to put the truth their own career advancement is how we got into this mess with the replication crisis.
But there's a difference between trusting two rival institutions that come to the same conclusion, and trusting a single research team that stands to advance quite significantly from a particular publishing.
Otoh with the mammal smaller like that it seems maybe like it could be more self defense or trying to distract a predator from their young or something other then the mammal being the predator..
And would this be a surprise, other than providing an interesting specimen?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-37545-8
It is possible that the mammal was scavenging the carcass of the dinosaur when the two became buried. This proposed scenario would account for the large size of the dinosaur relative to the mammal (terrestrial predators usually favour prey that are not much larger than themselves, particularly when hunting alone), and the fact that the mammal was biting the ribs of the dinosaur when it died, which would otherwise have been difficult to access (but not impossible—see below) on a living prey item. However, while plausible, we cite three lines of evidence that challenge this hypothesis. First, the bones of the dinosaur are otherwise devoid of tooth marks, which are commonly left by carnivorous mammals while scavenging. Second, it seems unlikely that the two animals would have become so entangled, were the dinosaur dead prior to the arrival of the mammal. Third, the scavenging scenario does not predict the position of the mammal atop the dinosaur, since the mammal could presumably just as easily have eaten the dinosaur from ground level.
We propose instead that the two animals were buried in an act of predation on the part of the mammal, only for both to have been entombed by a sudden lahar-type volcanic debris flow (Fig. 2). This hypothesis would explain the entwined nature of the skeletons, wherein the left hindfoot of the mammal became trapped within the folded left leg of the dinosaur when it collapsed to the ground. It would also account for the lack of tooth marks and other indications of scavenging on the dinosaur’s skeleton, and for the mammal’s position atop the dinosaur, as though to subdue its weakened prey.