Dinosaurs, as top predators, dominated the world's terrestrial ecosystems for about 140 million years. Among them, sauropods are the largest land animals ever built, such as the famous Lepidosaurus, Confused Dragon and Argentinosaurus, which were tens of meters long and thick in skin when they reached adulthood, making a group of predators helpless. If so, who can eat dinosaurs? The answer may be, other dinosaurs.
However, thanks to some rare fossils, scientists have found that this is not the case, and there were many dragon slayers who went straight to the dragon's nest and ate the meat of the dragon in the dangerous Mesozoic Era. Adult dinosaurs are powerful, but when they are in the eggshell, or just out of the shell, they are very fragile and easy to be preyed upon.
(C) Black Star refers to the fossil location of the ogre crocodile, surrounded by dinosaur eggs and eggshells (Source Reference[1])
Ogre crocodile Ogresuchus furatus body size, scale 10 cm, white for preserved bones (source reference [1])
Ogre crocodile Ogresuchus furatus restoration. (Source reference[1])
Interestingly, the oval dinosaur eggs in the dragon's lair are 19-23 cm long axis, 15 cm short axis, and 2.1-2.5 mm thick (egg thickness is generally 0.3 mm), which is larger than the skull of the ogre crocodile, even if a strong dinosaur egg is stuffed into the mouth, it can not exert effective bite force on the dinosaur egg. At the same time, none of the 30 eggshells around it and the more than 1,000 eggshell fragments at fossil sites left holes and cracks related to predation, so the ogre crocodile should not have evolved the ability to prey on large dinosaur eggs.
Dinosaur egg fragment (black arrow) next to the ogre crocodile skeleton (gray element). (Source reference[1])
The grey silhouette is a newly hatched dragon (predatory dragon), with the far right femur representing the largest predator. (Source reference[2])
The fossil and illustration of the "giant snake catching dragons" is the baby dinosaur in the lower right corner. (Source reference[3])
The Indian ancient rift snake is attacking a model of a juvenile Titanosaurus. (Source Wikipedia)
bibliography:
[1] Sellés, A.G., Blanco, A., Vila, B. et al. A small Cretaceous crocodyliform in a dinosaur nesting ground and the origin of sebecids. Sci Rep 10, 15293 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71975-y
[2] Curry Rogers, K., Whitney, M., Demic, M. & Bagley, B. Precocity in a tiny titanosaur from the Cretaceous of Madagascar. Science 352, 450–453 (2016).
[3] Wilson, J. A., Mohabey, D. M., Peters, S. E. & Head, J. J. Predation upon hatchling dinosaurs by a new snake from the Late Cretaceous of India. PLoS Biol. 8, e1000322 (2010).
Article source: Popular Science China Network