Feuerlande
13-01-2005, 21:16
This was originally posted in a small section of my ISP, CompuServes, sign on page. What do you think about this?
Bizarre Find Rewrites History of Mammals
The fossilized remains of a tiny dinosaur have been found inside the stomach of a mammal. The bizarre discovery in northeast China in the rich fossil beds of Liaoning province has rewritten the history of mammals as this offers the first proof that mammals hunted small dinosaurs some 130 million years ago, reports The Associated Press.
Conventional evolutionary theory has just been contradicted. It's always been assumed that early mammals were incapable of attacking and eating a dinosaur because those early mammals were no bigger than a chipmunk and were likely quite timid in the mammoth shadow cast by giant dinosaurs. Turns out, that's all wrong. In this particular case, the mammal was about the size of a large cat and the unlucky dinosaur was a very young "parrot dinosaur" that was just 5 inches long. The dinosaur-eater, which measured just 2 feet long and weighed about 15 pounds, belongs to a species called Repenomamus robustus, which was known previously only from skull fragments, notes AP. It has no modern relatives.
There was another big find at the same site: A mammal fossil that is the size of a modern dog, making it by far the largest early mammal ever found. It was gigantic for its time--about 20 times larger than most mammals living in the early Cretaceous Period, notes AP. This, too, is rewriting the history book of mammals. Now scientists think the time period known as the Age of Dinosaurs may have been very different than we have always thought. While mammals probably never attacked the 85-ton dinosaurs, smaller dinosaurs may well have been on the dinner menu for some meat-eating mammals. "This new evidence gives us a drastically new picture," paleontologist Meng Jin of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and a co-author of the study, told AP.
It's long been thought that mammals were small in this time period because the larger dinosaurs were hunting them, and they only grew larger when dinosaurs became extinct. Now the discovery of this much larger mammal is reversing some of that speculation. The study findings were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Bizarre Find Rewrites History of Mammals
The fossilized remains of a tiny dinosaur have been found inside the stomach of a mammal. The bizarre discovery in northeast China in the rich fossil beds of Liaoning province has rewritten the history of mammals as this offers the first proof that mammals hunted small dinosaurs some 130 million years ago, reports The Associated Press.
Conventional evolutionary theory has just been contradicted. It's always been assumed that early mammals were incapable of attacking and eating a dinosaur because those early mammals were no bigger than a chipmunk and were likely quite timid in the mammoth shadow cast by giant dinosaurs. Turns out, that's all wrong. In this particular case, the mammal was about the size of a large cat and the unlucky dinosaur was a very young "parrot dinosaur" that was just 5 inches long. The dinosaur-eater, which measured just 2 feet long and weighed about 15 pounds, belongs to a species called Repenomamus robustus, which was known previously only from skull fragments, notes AP. It has no modern relatives.
There was another big find at the same site: A mammal fossil that is the size of a modern dog, making it by far the largest early mammal ever found. It was gigantic for its time--about 20 times larger than most mammals living in the early Cretaceous Period, notes AP. This, too, is rewriting the history book of mammals. Now scientists think the time period known as the Age of Dinosaurs may have been very different than we have always thought. While mammals probably never attacked the 85-ton dinosaurs, smaller dinosaurs may well have been on the dinner menu for some meat-eating mammals. "This new evidence gives us a drastically new picture," paleontologist Meng Jin of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and a co-author of the study, told AP.
It's long been thought that mammals were small in this time period because the larger dinosaurs were hunting them, and they only grew larger when dinosaurs became extinct. Now the discovery of this much larger mammal is reversing some of that speculation. The study findings were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.