![]() ![]() Mammals and dinos have rarely been on an even playing field, however. Since the Triassic period 230 million years ago, mammals have lived alongside dinosaurs-and later with their descendants, birds. “It’s like watching the coyote catch the roadrunner.” “You would surely assume that it was the dinosaur eating the mammal, but the roles are reversed,” says Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the new study. The remarkable fossil, described Tuesday in Scientific Reports, offers researchers the first glimpse of a Mesozoic mammal actively hunting a much larger dinosaur. The entwined animals were buried mid-melee by a flow of volcanic debris from a nearby eruption that preserved both predator and prey in exquisite detail. This duel was ultimately doomed for both mammal and dinosaur. And the Repenomamus was sinking its teeth into the reptile’s ribcage. 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. 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.
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