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Mammals Preyed on Dinosaurs?
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?"
Badgers?! We don't need no stinking badgers!
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
..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, they were only around a meter long (and smaller) and would prey on very small dinos.
A blog like any other.
I for one welcome our new giant badger mammal overlords.
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.
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.
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.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
There's a communist country/[verb]s YOU joke in there somewhere...
Ceci n'est pas un post.
Yeah, go mammals! We rawk! Suck it, dino-chumps!
Woot! Woot! Representin' in the Mesozoic!
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Mammals have been eating dinosaurs for years.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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?
In South Korea, only FOSSILS eat dinosaurs!
Over at Pharyngula 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.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
However, the idea of mammals as predators upon juvenile dinosaurs goes back a long way. One of the older hypotheses about the demise of the dinosaurs is that mammals developed a taste for eggs and ate them into oblivion.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
That was an informative blog entry.
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.
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
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.
sudo ergo sum
Really, it was nothing.
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 walks - - -like a duck. In a cat, which is an eutherian, the pelvis provides a stable circular platform for attachement of legs to the body. Cats can walk fast, in a STRAIGHT line. Possoms waddle. Kangaroos leap, using both legs to propell themselves forward. All of this is to point out that the triconodonts were not agile ambulators. This is the main reason for the demise of the big carnivorous marsupials of Australia and ancient S.America. When the true eutherian arrived, it was able to out-reproduce and out-run the other vertebrates. Think of the destructive eutherian as a rat, eating it's way through extinct species. The first eutherians probably concentrated on the eggs of the other vertebrates and then took-on the pseudo-mammals. Interesting.