‘Crocodiles fed on young dinosaurs’
Crocodile-like beasts may have munched on young dinosaurs some 75 million years ago, scientists say. Scientists who analysed bite marks on dinosaur bones suggested the rivalry between the reptiles started early in life.
Bites from living crocodylians such as alligators and crocodiles are often seen on the bones of their prey and scavenged bodies. Scientists can use these to identify bite marks on fossils from crocodyliforms, the reptiles to which modern crocodylians belong, LiveScience reported.
Now, scientists have unearthed fossils in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah which provide direct evidence of a small crocodyliform biting juvenile dinosaurs.
“This area is very hot and arid in the summer and cold in the winter. Most of the area is dominated by massive, cliff-forming rock outcrops,” said researcher Clint Boyd, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
Back when the reptiles were alive, their environment was warm and wet, dominated by rivers and flood plains and lush with bushes and trees. Dinosaurs in the area included duck-billed hadrosaurs, horned ceratopsians such as Triceratops and predatory relatives of T-rex. The area also holds a diverse assembly of crocodyliforms, including the gigantic alligatoroid Deinosuchus riograndensis. Scientists uncovered fossils of three members of a two-legged herbivorous dinosaur known as a hypsilophodontid.
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