When dinosaurs walked the Earth our planet was a much different and no doubt scarier place. While one might imagine a giant t-rex stomping around and eating everything in sight, experts now say that this fossil had shed some light on one of the cretaceous periods' fiercest predators.
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00:00 [Music]
00:04 When dinosaurs walked the Earth, our planet was a much different and no doubt scarier place.
00:09 And while one might imagine a giant T-Rex stomping around and eating everything in sight,
00:13 experts now say that this fossil has shed some light on one of the Cretaceous period's fiercest predators.
00:18 This fossil includes not only a skeleton of another predator,
00:21 one that was fossilized during mortal combat with another,
00:24 but also one that's called Repenomimus Robustus,
00:27 which science alert likens to essentially a prehistoric opossum.
00:30 The creature lived between 125 and 101 million years ago in what is now Asia.
00:36 Experts say they were aware this creature might have attacked dinosaurs that were much smaller than itself,
00:40 but this shows it likely went after much larger prey.
00:43 Not only that, but this is also some of the earliest evidence showing a mammal preying on a dinosaur.
00:48 That's because when mammals first began roaming the planet, they were very small.
00:52 Most of them were closer to the size of something like a modern-day rat or shrew.
00:56 Or cry from other modern-day varieties like elephants that actually rival the size of dinosaurs.
01:01 In fact, here is an artist's rendition of what this ancient opossum might have looked like
01:05 after downing its much larger prey before molten rock from a volcano overtook them.
01:10 [ Music ]