75-Million-Year-Old Fossil of First Tyrannosaur Found in Stomach

The last meal of a Tyrannosaur has been found for the first time in history that shows a child. Gorgosaurus with his belly in position. Man eating only the legs of two small, feathered reptiles appears to have been a popular and plentiful food about 75 million years ago. food, and type. Citipes elegans It is now best known in the fossilized stomach.

“It feels bad for the Citipes, but lucky for us,” researches the author Dr Darla Zelenitsky of the University of Calgary told IFLScience. Zelenitsky describes the Gorgosaurus example as a “one in the news” – however, it is important to note that his work includes some of these things now – because of his uniqueness as the first Tyrannosaur was found in its stomach.

Bone damage tells us that Gorgosaurus must die within a week of eating the Citipes feet, but what did he die of? “It is very clear what is the cause of the death of young children Citipes o,” the author joked Dr François Therrien of the Royal Tyrrell Museum. “But the cause of death is Gorgosaurus? We have no idea, but (it) probably didn’t die because of the vacuum.”

“The dead body of the dinosaur was found at the bottom of the river, but it does not mean that it drowned in the river. The only thing is that it is a good environment to bury because the rivers carry a lot of silt”.

The time of death can have a big impact on our ability to learn about extinct animals, especially when it comes to their rare food-caught behavior. Exceptions were found in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia where prehistoric animals sometimes died due to sudden collapse of the sand.

“Say there was a rain, and the mountains fell on the dinosaurs, you often find (preserved) in these conditions of life, which is very good,” Continued Zelenitsky. “So you do Oviraptors sitting on the clutches of their eggs are actually sleeping. The famous example known from Mongolia is the sandbar, and the Velociraptor and Protoceratops in fact they are physically connected and fighting each other.”

“That story, this specimen from Alberta, which is preserved in the river environment, gives us a good picture of the behavior of a Tyrannosaur dinosaur, and that is its feeding behavior. This is exactly what a eater is, a person who eats, and does not pursue small and fast things like Citipes.“

Examining the eating habits of juvenile Tyrannosaurs explores a hypothesis Therrien and Zelentisky explored about how these animals controlled certain ecosystems. They argue that, rather than following a single diet throughout their lives, these animals changed their diet as they matured – meaning that although only one group of animals represent, but they held many positions in the food chain.

We know from fossil evidence that adults were inferior to large herbivores such as ceratopsians (toothed dinosaurs) and hadrosaurs (duck dinosaurs). Adults Gorgosaurus measure poetry 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) and used their large skulls and “banana-shaped” teeth to catch large prey and bite through bones – but for a long time, we didn’t know if they did ‘in small boys (about one third of that weight).

“Now that we have evidence that the diet of young Tyrannosaurs is different from that of adults, we want to try to confirm if there are other things we can say, like what kind of animals they ate feed it, or when exactly it was done. diet change, and how,” said Therrien.

“The fact that Tyrannosaurs were able to occupy different parts of the environment during their lives is probably one of the things that made them successful animals that allowed them to control their environment. without giving a chance for other types of theropods to come in and try to carve a mark. .”

Occupying different ecological niches would have provided it Gorgosaurus the success of not competing for resources with its adults and children, and may have contributed to Tyrannosaurs later becoming some of the largest dinosaurs in the history of the world.

The research is published in the journal Scientific Advances.