An extraordinary fossil captures the moment when a hungry mammal attacked a dinosaur
During the Cretaceous period 125 million years ago, a ravenous Repenomamus, an ancient mammal the size of an opossum, pounced on an unsuspecting Psittacosaurus—an herbivorous dinosaur more than three times its size. As the animals grappled, one of the mammal’s hind legs was pinned below the dinosaur as its front paw grasped the dinosaur’s beak. And the Repenomamus was sinking its teeth into the reptile’s ribcage.
This made Repenomamus robustus a mammalian giant for its day. It tipped the scale at around 10 pounds and belonged to a now extinct family of carnivorous mammals that experienced their heyday during the Early Cretaceous. The new study’s fossilized brawl was uncovered in 2012 by a local farmer and was soon acquired by Gang Han, a paleontologist at China’s Hainan Vocational University of Science and Technology. To describe the remarkable find, Han teamed up with colleagues in Canada. “My eyes just about popped out of my head when I was shown the fossil,” says study co-author Jordan Mallon, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ontario.
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