The last meal of a 75-million-year-old tyrannosaur has been revealed by scientists – two baby dinosaurs.
Researchers say the preservation of the animal – and of the small, unfortunate creatures it ate – shines new light on how these predators lived.
It is “solid evidence that tyrannosaurs drastically changed their diet as they grew up,” said Dr Darla Zelenitsky, from the University of Calgary.
The specimen is a juvenile gorgosaurus – a close cousin of the giant T. rex.
This particular gorgosaur was around seven years old – equivalent to a teenager in terms of its development. It weighed about 330kg when it died – about a tenth of the weight of a fully-grown adult.
The hind limbs of two, small bird-like dinosaurs called citipes are visible beneath its ribcage.
“We now know that these teenage [tyrannosaurs] hunted small, young dinosaurs,” said Dr Zelenitsky, one of the lead scientists in this study, which is published in the journal Science Advances.
An array of earlier fossil evidence, including evident bite marks on the bones of larger dinosaurs that match tyrannosaur teeth, have allowed scientists to build a picture of how the three-tonne adult gorgosaurs attacked and ate very large plant-eating dinosaurs which lived in herds.
Dr Francois Therrien, from the Royal Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology, described these adult tyrannosaurs as “quite indiscriminate eaters”. They probably pounced on large prey, “biting through bone and scraping off flesh,” he told BBC News.
But, Dr Zelenitsky, added, “these smaller, immature tyrannosaurs were probably not ready to jump into a group of horned dinosaurs, where the adults weighed thousands of kilograms”.
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