The artist’s impression of an encouragement between an old Caiman and a terrorist bird
Julian Bayona BEERRA
For approx. 13 million years ago in a large South American wetland, clashes colossal predators. The fossilized bone from a huge aircraftless bird found in Colombia shows tooth marks made of a giant Caiman.
Andrés Link at the University of Andes in Colombia and his colleagues studied crocodile fossils in a museum collection when they do one of the bones that did not fit. It turned out to belong to a Phorusrhacid bird – a group also known as the “terrorist birds”. These upper predators had hatchet -shaped beak and powerful legs with sharp claws on the toes. The fossilized bone came from the lower leg of a 2.5 meter high, possibly one of the large types of terrorist birds still discovered.
But this predator may have put an ugly finish. The bone, originally discovered in Colombia’s Tatacoa Desert -Région by the local paleontologist César Perdomo, was scarred with four deep divots: Teeth marks.
Link and his team would know what Beast dared to wrap his jaws around such a scary predator. Then they scanned the surface of the fossil to generate a digital model of the tooth marks and compared them to the teeth of old predators from the region. The culprit was probably not a mammal.
“There is no sign of gnawing and the marks are Ruded and in [a] Line that is more similar to those applied by crocodiles and caimans, ”says Link.
The terrorist bird lived at a time when North -Syd America was dominated by the Pebas system, a massive network of wetlands that were together with tropical forests and grasslands. The flooded ecosystem hosted a great diversity of crocodilians, and the team found a fight for the teeth marks in one of them: a giant Caiman called Purussaurus neivensis. Link estimates would have been approx. 4.5 meters long.
“Terror birds were undoubtedly at the top of the food chain,” says Link. “But this proof shows us that they could also fall as prey for large caimans when they approved large bodies of water. Maybe they should look for prey or [were] Moving over this complex ecosystem. “
The team notes that they cannot rule out the possibility that the bird was already dead when Caiman found it and the tooth marks are proof of cleansing. There is no sign of bone healing surrounding the tooth marks. So whatever the bird did not survive the meeting.
“These kinds [tooth] Tracks are more common than people think, ”says Carolina Acosta Hospitalche at the National University of La Plata in Argentina.
In a study published last year, she and a colleague described tooth marks on much smaller and older terrorist bird fossil – approx. 43 million years old – from Argentina. The markings suggest an old carnivorous marsupial that is fed with that bird. The sale of these tracks was also on the lower leg, speculating on Hospitalche if that part of the terrorist bird was a vulnerable place for predators to chomp and grab their prey.
“” “[Bite marks] Give us these amazing little snapshots in life in the past, ”says Stephanie Drumheller at the University of Tennessee.
When studying old environments, there is a tendency to try exactly to categorize extingunet organizations in certain ecological roles, she says. However, food can be complex.
“This is an animal that lived in the water and did things in the water, this is an animal that lived up on land and dooing on land, and your two must meet,” says Drumheller. “But of race nature is always messy than our lovely, small, neat boxes.”
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