This Badger Ate Dinosaurs for Breakfast

[barnabas]

BBC News claims a new fossil discovery published in Nature,1 a large badger-like carnivorous mammal, ate dinosaurs for lunch. But then again, who knows what time of day the Cretaceous restaurants were open?

The fossil, another in a series of spectacular finds from the Liaoning Province in China, is creating a sensation, because it overturns an assumption that Mesozoic mammals were ecological underdogs

[Old Timer]

Thanks for posting this, barnabas. I wil try to find something more.

[hmh]

Ok, I can't control myself so I have to ask this... Did the dinosaurs taste like chicken to the badgers?

[dwinkjr]

Ok, I can't control myself so I have to ask this... Did the dinosaurs taste like chicken to the badgers? 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What would we taste like to a chicken

[nebula]

OK, this is the best source I've found so far:

From American Museum of Natural History <<--LINK

(It includes pictures!)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History and their colleagues have studied a fossil of a 130-million-year-old opossum-sized mammal called Repenomamus robustus and found the remains of a psittacosaur in its stomach area. This fossil, discovered in China and described in a new paper in the journal Nature, is the first direct evidence that some primitive mammals fed on small vertebrates, including young dinosaurs. In the same paper, the team also has described the fossil of a much larger and very close relative of the psittacosaur eater, Repenomamus giganticus, which was the size of a small dog

[Bread_of_Life]

Cool,

Can you link me into this story please, I didn't find the link in your post. Of course, the reason that the evolution of larger mammals is hypothesised to have been to do with the extinction of the dinosaurs is because of the correlation between this extinction (the K-T boundary), and the growth in the number of species of large mammals.

In fact, all creatures that we know of in the cretacious weighing over 25kg were wiped out at the K-T - leaving a huge gap in the niche market of "big carnivore". Mammals, over the next 66 million years, filled that gap.

Of course, this find is very interesting, it shows that, at least in some areas, mammals did grow larger than mice even before the K-T boundary. However, it's relationship to anti-evolutionism I cannot fathom.

[nebula]

Can you link me into this story please, I didn't find the link in your post.

Do you see "American Museum of Natural History" underlined?

Move your curser over that and left-click.

[nebula]

With all due respect, I wouldn't bring out the confetti so fast.

When scientists make new discoveries like this, their reaction is, "Wow! Cool!!!"

The whole system of science is set up to readjust itself when new discoveries are made that invalidate previous concepts.

A discovery like this is a very, very minor adjustment in the whole scheme of things.

When the scientists actually start panicking about a discovery - then you can throw your party.

[Bread_of_Life]

Well, all that matter is that another one of sciences baseless theories about the ages and origins of some bones they found in the ground has been proven false.

Has it? I see no doubt about the age of the bones, or their origin. They are 130 million years old, their origin is early mammalian, they retain certain features from their therapsid reptile ancestors, and they are bigger than other mammals previously found in the same period elsewhere.

What's the big deal?