Nonetheless badly your day goes, spare a thought for the traditional sea cow that is the topic of newly revealed analysis from a global analysis group.
Dragged by a crocodile earlier than its physique was later chewed on by a shark some 20 million years in the past, it would not have been a pleasing finish for the dugong. However a examine of its stays offers modern-day specialists an interesting perception into the marine meals chain of the Early to Center Miocene epoch – which, it appears, labored in the same strategy to the way it does now.
“Today, often when we observe a predator in the wild, we find the carcass of prey which demonstrates its function as a food source for other animals too, but fossil records of this are rarer,” says paleontologist Aldo Benites-Palomino, from the College of Zurich in Switzerland.
“We have been unsure as to which animals would serve this purpose as a food source for multiple predators.”
The story begins with the invention of some uncommon rocks by an area farmer, south of the town of Coro, in northern Venezuela. When the researchers had been referred to as in, they discovered the minerals contained elements of a skeleton fossil, together with a piece of a cranium and 18 totally different vertebrae.
Evaluation confirmed that they had been left by a person from the extinct sea cow genus Culebratherium which met a most unlucky finish.
A examine of chunk marks discovered on the fossils helped the researchers reconstruct its closing hours. It appears to have been attacked by a crocodile that tore into the ocean cow, and fairly presumably took it down in a loss of life roll. The group additionally discovered marks throughout the skeleton constant in form and measurement with the enamel of an extinct tiger shark (Galeocerdo sp), apparently scavenging meat from the useless or dying animal. They even confirmed the shark species – G. aduncus – from the tooth it left behind within the sea cow’s neck.
It seems that as soon as the crocodile had had its fill, then one other carnivore got here alongside to select at no matter was left.
By analyzing the sediment across the space the place the stays had been found – effectively away from earlier fossil finds within the area – the researchers had been in a position to date the fossil again round 20 million years.
“Our findings constitute one of the few records documenting multiple predators over a single prey, and as such provide a glimpse of food chain networks in this region during the Miocene,” says Benites-Palomino.
Having the ability to construct up such a whole image of this sea cow’s demise is testomony to the laborious work of the analysis group: in complete, a number of months of effort had been concerned in figuring out the fossil and figuring out what had occurred to it.
“Evidence of trophic interactions are not scarce in the fossil record, yet these are mostly represented by fragmentary fossils exhibiting marks of ambiguous significance,” the researchers write of their revealed paper.
“Differentiating between marks of active predation and scavenging events is therefore often challenging.”
The analysis has been revealed within the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
