Armored fish preys flying Dino, Fossil suggest

March 13, 2012 12:58
Armored fish preys flying Dino, Fossil suggest

Fish sometimes don't take care with what they eat, because their brains are not very smart. Occasionally you find fish that died because they ate another fish that was too big to get swallowed, and the same things happened here with these pterosaurs—say Scientists.

Dinosaurs the most feared animals on this earth were really huge enough and almost were dominant. But a peculiar fossil discovered by scientists at Bavaria, Germany dispelled this myth.  In spite of having wings and flying high the Pterosaurs was not spared by a carnivorous fish, aspidorhynchus. A 120 million years old fossil excavated shows that all of the pterosaur victims discovered, which had wingspans of about 27 inches (70 cm), were positioned such that their wings were near the mouths of their 25-inch-long (65 cm) fish predators.

This suggests that the predator might have grabbed hold of their wing membranes. In one specimen, a pterosaur wing bone is actually caught within the jaws of the fish. In another of the fossils, the pterosaur has a tiny fish in its throat, apparently swallowing it headfirst. This suggests the flying reptile was alive when it was seized, and not dead and perhaps scavenged by the armored fish.

Incredibly, one of the remains of the pterosaur has another, smaller fish, leptolepides, seemingly lodged in its throat. This only suggests that the before being preyed by the fish, the dino had just time to nimble up a smaller fish. Scientists also doubt whether the pterosaur was a regular part of the diet of the armoured fish, while suggesting an alternative theory that the attack could have been a mistake. "These animals normally have nothing to do with each other," said researcher Eberhard Frey, a paleozoologist at the State Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany. "Apparently these encounters were fatal for both of them." Frey and his colleague, Helmut Tischlinger, detailed their findings online March 7 in the journal PLoS ONE. (With inputs from internet- AarKay)

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