A fossil found in 2012 in the Chinese province of Liaoning appeared to show a Psittacosaurus, a plant-eating Triceratops relative, entangled with a Repenomamus, a smaller mammal.Credit...Gang Han
The New York Times has a story about an interesting dinosaur fossil from China. A 125 million year old fossil of a Psittacosaurus and a Repenomamus seems to show a fight to the death between a dinosaur and an ancestral mammal. It was discovered in 2012 by farmers in the Chinese province of Liaoning. Liaoning is known for superbly preserved fossil dating to the early Cretaceous Period. The fossil was described in a paper in the journal Scientific Reports. A section of the paper addresses the authenticity of the specimen.
The prehistoric skirmish took place around 125 million years ago, in what’s now northeastern China, and appears to be something like a man-bites-dog story of the dinosaur era. Usually in that period, conventional wisdom holds, mammals were meek, eking out a tenuous existence as terrible reptiles shook the ground around them. But the unlikely fossil depicts combat between a mammal called Repenomamus robustus and a bipedal, plant-eating relative of Triceratops called Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis.
Size-wise, the dinosaur had an advantage, but Repenomamus, preserved with its teeth clamped into Psittacosaurus’s rib cage, appears to have punched above its weight. The dinosaur’s bones don’t show evidence of being gnawed on by scavengers, indicating that the Repenomamus encounter happened when the Psittacosaurus was still alive.
“There are examples today of small carnivorous mammals taking down much, much larger prey,” said Jordan Mallon, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature and a co-author of the study. He pointed to wolverines taking down caribou. He added, “We think Repenomamus was probably similarly a small, feisty predator that was willing to take down prey that was much larger than itself if it had to.”
