Dino dining on mammals: Canadian scientists part of rare discovery revealing diet of microraptors | 24CA News
An worldwide group of scientists have found new proof of a dinosaur eating on historical mammals.
The foot of a tiny mammal was contained in the abdomen of a microraptor — a small feathered dinosaur that lived through the Cretaceous some 100 million years in the past in temperate forests in what’s now China.
It’s the primary time a bit of a mammal was found inside a microraptor.
“Looking at interactions between animals, that’s much easier to tell in the modern biology in living animals because we can actually go out and make those observations,” mentioned Caleb Brown, a curator of dinosaur systematics and evolution on the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alta.
“Trying to make those inferences for fossils is more difficult because you don’t necessarily know exactly which animal ate which other animal, unless you have exceptional cases like this.”
This discover alone won’t change understanding of Cretaceous ecosystems and the way they developed, mentioned Corwin Sullivan, a professor within the division of organic sciences on the University of Alberta, who was concerned within the new discovery.
But the invention will contribute to the buildup of paleontological information and permit to “build up a very general picture of how food webs functioned, to some degree, in the geological past, how these various species were behaving and interacting,” Sullivan mentioned.
“It’s rare for a preserved fossil vertebrate to have any kind of gut contents, and certainly evidence of dinosaurs eating mammals is rare.
“This provides to the proof that microraptor particularly had what we describe as a generalist food regimen.”
As It Happens7:22Dinosaur’s last meal preserved for more than 100 million years
Most food only lasts several days, weeks at most. But one microraptor fossil was found with the remains of its prey — a mammal’s foot — still intact, more than 100 million years later. Hans Larsson, a McGill University palaeontologist and the study’s senior author, tells As It Happens host Nil Köksal what this reveals about how these ancient bird-like creatures lived
Previously, microraptors were found with fish and lizards in their stomachs. The discovery provides hard evidence that carnivorous microraptors were generalist feeders.
Generalists are really important in stabilizing ecosystems, said Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in vertebrate paleontology at McGill University in Montreal, who also participated in the research.
“This discovery is telling us that microraptor was occupying this generalist feeding area of interest, whereas we all know that different dinosaurs that had been equally near the origin of birds had been doing a wide range of various things ecologically,” Sullivan said.
“This provides to that image of a wealthy range of dinosaurs carefully associated to birds inhabiting Cretaceous environments.”
The researchers could not identify the mammal found in the microraptor, Larsson said, and
the measurements of the foot don’t match any known mammal that lived at that time.
The animal probably superficially looked like a rodent and weighed about 15 grams, Larsson said.
This knowledge, Brown said, is important because fossils like these allow scientists to better understand how ecosystems adapted to global change.
“It’s actually solely by trying on the previous that we will see how ecosystems have modified and tailored in response to varied perturbations, and from that we will actually draw potential inferences for our present biodiversity disaster.”
