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The oldest evidence that dinosaurs ate mammals. The ancient reptiles looked like crows and had four wings
What did dinosaurs eat? These carnivores also ate mammals. Does this have any relation to humans?
This may be the earliest evidence that dinosaurs ate mammals. It involves an animal foot found in the chest of a microraptor. Microraptors were small and feathered. The individual, which swallowed a fragment of the ancient mammal’s leg shortly before it died, was the size of a modern crow.
Insights into the dinosaur menu
Unlike tyrannosaurs, stegosaurs or diplodocuses, microraptors are not particularly popular among paleontology and dinosaur enthusiasts. That may change after a recent discovery reported in the scientific journal Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Microraptor zhaoianus lived in the early Cretaceous (about 120 million years ago) in what is now China. It was small in size, and one of the things that distinguished it from modern birds was that it had not two, but at least four wings. Thus “armed” it hunted small vertebrates among the trees.
The specimen was first described more than 20 years ago, in 2000. A previous team of scientists had not found the remains of another animal inside the dinosaur.
