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A fossil shows that dinosaurs were also prey of mammals
The discovery casts doubt on the idea that mammals were nothing more than prey for dinosaurs during the Cretaceous period, a period in which they were the dominant animals.
"The surprising thing here is that these are seabeds. It's a shallow tropical sea full of plesiosaurs, mosasaurs and sharks. It's not exactly a place where you would expect to find many dinosaurs. But we are finding them," said Nick Longrich, a paleontologist and co-author of the original study published in Cretaceous Research .
The estimated age of the fossils directly matches them with the sudden mass extin Phone Number List ction phenomenon of the late Cretaceous. 66 million years ago, three-quarters of the animal and plant species on Earth disappeared. The general consensus to explain the extinction is the fall of a meteorite in the Gulf of Mexico, near the Yucatan Peninsula.
The theory indicates that all fossils from the late Cretaceous should be in poorly diverse soil. The Moroccan Abelisaurs that coexisted with several other species are evidence that, at least in low latitudes, dinosaurs lived in diverse habitats and were successful, until the arrival of the meteorite.
"Dinosaur remains, despite their rarity, convey the same messages as the more abundant remains of marine reptiles. They tell us that, just before the Cretaceous-Paleogene crisis, biodiversity was not declining, but rather, by On the contrary, it was diverse,” explains Nour-Eddine Jalil, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum and Cadi Ayyad University.
This is such a broad scope that it calls into question the meaning of endemic , to the point that Patrick Mazi, associate professor of medicine and first author of the paper, urges doctors to stop considering fungal infections as geographically determined and to focus in the symptoms. "Let us recognize that everything is dynamic and changing," he proposes. "We should recognize it for the sake of our patients.
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發表於 2024-3-12 13:37:13