Dino Fight

The Velciraptor, famous for wanting to kill small children in Jurassic Park, is known to be a fearsome predator. Recent fossil evidence, though, also suggests that sometimes they weren’t lucky enough to catch a break, and that they had to resort to scavenging.

Paleontologists dug up a Protoceratops fossil and two teeth from a carnivore in Mongolia, the home to the Velciraptor—not Montana as Jurassic Park says. Protoceratops is in the same family as the more familiar Triceratops, and is much smaller and lacks the trademark horns, but has a similar beak and neck frill.

The found teeth were matched to a Velociraptor, or a fellow raptor of similar size. The Protoceratops had scratches on the jaw and skull from the found teeth, which suggest scavenging. "This pattern is also seen in living carnivores — when faced with a large body, they start on the belly and hindlegs and the head is nearly always the last to go. Here the skull and jaws are the bones with the marks on and thus most likely to be the bits left over, not those first taken on,” said David Hone, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of China in Beijing.

The picture with this article is of a famous fossil from another Protoceratops v Velociraptor meeting. Nicknamed “fighting dinosaurs,” the fossil depicts the two beasts fighting. Discovery Channel had a special on their series “Dinosaur Planet” in which the fight was recreated, and the fossil was recreated by two CGI dinosaurs fighting in a desert, and a collapse of a dune buried them both, thus creating a situation in which the fossil can be formed in such a way.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/19/velociraptor-scavenging-larger-dinosaur/