The 125 million-year-old fossil, found in China’s Liaoning province, shows the skeletons of a prehistoric badgerlike mammal attacking a larger dinosaur called Psittacosaurus.
Scale bar equals 10 centimeters.
The study authors acknowledged that there have been some fossil forgeries known from this part of the world, which Mallon said was a concern when they started their research. But after doing their own preparations of the skeletons and analyzing the rock samples, he said they were confident that the fossil — which was found by a farmer in 2012 — was genuine, and would welcome other scientists to study the fossil as well.
The mammal in the fossil duo is the meat-eating Repenomamus robustus, about the size of a house cat, Mallon said. The dinosaur — Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis — was about as big as a medium-sized dog with a parrotlike beak.
This species was a plant eater, but other dinosaurs were meat eaters or ate both. In the end, dinosaurs were probably still eating mammals more often than the other way around, Mallon said.