A Fact On Dinosaurs

An earliest ‘crime scene’ in Utah has discovered facts of a dinosaur in the act of plundering on a small mammal.

In Dixie National Forest, a 77-million-year-old dinosaur graze mark and scratched-out digging traces were discovered next to a series of mammal burrows by Edward Simpson and his colleagues, a geologist at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.

New Scientist quoted Simpson as says “It appears a dinosaur was digging down and trapping rodent-like mammals in a similar way to coyotes hunting around prairie dog burrows today.”

The size and curving of the claw indicate that it was a maniraptoran theropod - carnivorous dinosaurs including velociraptors and the associates of modern birds among their ranks.

The traces were conserved when sand was suddenly dumped onto the burrows during a flood. It is published in Geology.