Could a small mammal take down a dinosaur? A mammal attacked a much larger dinosaur - then a volcano froze them both in time. Follow on social for more NOVA content! Twitter: / novapbs Instagram: / novapbs TikTok: / novapbs
My theory : dino not dead yet, but nearly, perhaps from a fall or another predator & maybe immobilized. Mammal sees an easy meal, dino comes to, moves foot...CUE THE MUDSLIDE !
How did they rule out the possibility that these creatures were killed in two different locations by the same volcanic mud flow and their corpses ended up being sloshed together by chance?
@@debbylou5729 I think you misunderstood my question. I didn't assume or imply it would be difficult to rule out. The question was, _how_ did they rule it out? And yes, I'd _really_ like to know. It's a reasonable question.
I guess either theory is valid. I think they're going on how they're tangled together, maybe it looks like the mammal is chomping on part of the dinosaur. But even they admit it's just an educated guess as this sort of evidence of interaction is "limited".
More likely they happen to settle together in the mudslide as apposed to engaging with each other before or during the event. Funny they left that out as an option when that is by far the norm.
Fascinating and spectacular find. A snapshot of time long ago. The both dying in the throes of the fight for survival is my imagination’s best guess and the theory I prefer. But I’m no expert.
Is there a theory of how the smaller mammal is attacking the dino ? It may have been locked on the dino's throat, with the dino too weak to bite back, explaining the mammal's hand in the dino's mouth.
So they both died so quick so fast at the same time. Idk how they stood lock together an not released an try to escape an flee. Like a snake when it got some pray an it know that it mite be attacked it will let its prey go in order to save itself
@@texasermd1Fiji mermaids? Not a fossil, but hoaxes are common. Try "Hobby Lobby faked artifacts". Or all the faked mummies from the very start of European plunder of ancient Egyptian sacred sites. And everywhere else. (Just look at the "great finds" cherished in museums, a thousand times more just stored in crates behind the scenes.) Imo why not scam the people desecrating sites in other countries & stealing everything? That includes fossils. Bad for science, but there's lousy ethics all over the fingerprints of "discovery". Heisenberg's Principle and the rape of the natural world. (I'm of course not anti-science. I'm just not a fan of blindly accepting the "work" of "brave" "explorers" like Jacques Cousteau & Crístobal Colón, and their "scientific" conclusions about the peoples they destroyed.)
I have seen some other evidence to suggest that dinosaurs might not have ruled the earth too. It has, of course, very little implications for today. Darwinian evolution with modification, natural selection and survival of the fittest has many powerful implications today; and we should stop trying to do our best to reverse it, because it is getting really very costly.
What about rigor mortis? Sure, it takes a while to start and it wears off fairly soon, and the jaw could have been held closed during that by the mud flow[floe?], but I just think that's quite serendipitous to the point of farce. It's still a well cool fossil on its own as it is. We can see that this small mammal did scavenge, or they were just pushed together like OP said, but then they lived in the same locale as the other animal locked in the fossil. Unless dating shows an older fossil was pushed into a newer one, idk. Nature is wild, and I'm not a paleontologist.
@@mookinbabysealfurmittens It could be anything tha that happened, but Occam's razor can also be applied here too. It seem obvious that it would take an extraordinary evidence to prove something else happened than "they were in a fight when they died"
@@or2ak my statement basically identifies that, as we keep discovering thing we realize we were wrong all along. Such as we revolve around the sun not the other way around. Now they think some dinosaurs had feathers. Mammals now maybe hunter Dino’s, maybe aliens are real… with these congressional hearings. What we know is that we know nothing for sure!
They could have been singing Hakuna Matata when they got fried, being best friends and all, co-dependant, or symbiotically-oriented with the right pronouns, etc. and benefitting their environment by being best pals. You know? Why fight? Make love, not war assumptions.
