40-foot-long Kronosaurus ate a 23-foot-long marine reptile who ate a pterosaur, fossil shows
Amateur fossil hunters helped discover evidence of a Cretaceous Era food chain in the Australian Outback. The post 40-foot-long Kronosaurus ate a 23-foot-long marine reptile who ate a pterosaur, fossil shows appeared first on Popular Science.
For the first time, paleontologists digging in the Australian Outback have discovered a fossilized food chain. The remains found inside of an ancient marine reptile chowing down on a flying dinosaur vividly illustrates this prehistoric predator-prey relationship in action. But what goes around, comes around.
As paleontologists explain in a study published in the journal Gondwana Research, the massive ichthyosaur who made a meal of the pterosaur soon became a snack for a gigantic apex predator that swam the inland Eromanga Sea over 100 million years ago. “It’s one of the clearest examples ever discovered of a three-tier predator interaction and offers an unprecedented snapshot of behaviour in Australia’s Cretaceous seas,” Dean Lomax, a paleontologist and reviewer of the new study, said in a statement. Forensics signs of the fossils were first discovered in 2019 by four fossil hunter hobbyists near the town of Richmond in Queensland.
The group amassed and stored multiple large specimens that they later nicknamed their “Bag of Bones,” which lKronosaurus Korner fossil museum curator Kevin Petersen decided to investigate further. A team of museum staff and volunteers spent over 600 hours uncovering and preparing what eventually revealed itself to be a massive, partially articulated ichthyosaur specimen measuring nearly 23 feet long. The feeding sequence is the first example of its kind discovered in Australia.
There was even more to find, however. Excavators also identified multiple oddly shaped rock nodules near the ichthyosaur’s skull. Instead of breaking them apart, they opted to avoid any potential damage by sending the mysteries to the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization to perform advanced synchrotron CT scans.
They soon learned that the rocks contained a prehistoric menu of squid-like cephalopods, fish, and most surprisingly, the jaw of a flying dinosaur. While remarkably preserved, the ichthyosaur did not make it out of the Eromanga Sea in on
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