Whether they had sharp teeth, vicious claws or were simply enormous, dinosaurs were creatures to be feared. But a newly identified fossil shows that, at least sometimes, the underdog bit back. Experts revealed the 125m-year-old fossil that froze in time after being taken on by a small mammal a third of its size. They are tangled together, the mammal’s teeth sunk into the beaked dinosaur’s ribs, its left paw clasping the beast’s lower jaw. Researchers said the discovery challenged a long-held view of early mammals as “fodder” for dinosaurs. Dr…
Tag: Evolution
‘Gargantuan’: China fossils reveal 70-tonne dinosaur had 15-metre neck
A dinosaur that roamed east Asia more than 160m years ago has been named a contender for the animal with the longest neck ever known. A new analysis of bones from the beast’s neck and skull revealed that the dinosaur, known as Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum, sported a neck 15metres long, or one-and-a-half times the length of a doubledecker bus. The fossilised remains of the creature were recovered in 1987 from 162 million-year-old rocks in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of north-west China, but the full length of the animal’s neck was…