Rarely does the fossil record provide us with such startling evidence of extremely cool events that we wish we could’ve seen in person, but you’re lucky that these incredibly awesome moments are somehow frozen in time. That seems like what happened, as a new study published in Gondwana Research depicts an extraordinarily amazing sight uncovered by paleontologists: an ancient predator ate another ancient predator, which itself had just finished eating a flying reptile.
Heck yeah.
It’s like those pictures of a smaller fish getting eaten by a bigger fish which is getting eaten by an even bigger fish, but real, prehistoric, and buried under the ground for millions of years. You know, waiting to be discovered and turned into an album cover.
Scientists Found Pterosaur Remains Inside an Ichthyosaur That Was Then Attacked by a Bigger Predator
The fossil was discovered in Queensland, Australia, and it features a Platypterygius australis, a roughly 20-foot-long ichthyosaur, a dolphin-shaped marine reptile that was munching on a flying pterosaur. Scientists found fragments of a pterosaur’s jaw mixed in what they believe were the ichthyosaur’s fossilized stomach contents. This on its own is noteworthy, as it’s the first direct evidence that this species dined on pterosaurs.
Unfortunately for the ichthyosaur, it was only a short time away from being another creature’s meal. The fossil’s shattered ribs, crushed vertebrae, and massive bite marks heavily suggest that just a short while after it ate the pterosaurs, an even bigger predator, a Kronosaurus queenslandicus, a pliosaur that was more than 30 feet long and sat near the top of the Cretaceous food pyramid, came along and ate the ichthyosaur, thus completing the prehistoric turducken, capturing three parts of the prehistoric food chain in a single fossil.
Most of the time, scientists find a regular old boring fossil of something that died billions of years ago. Rarely do they get a snapshot of an entire vividly rendered scene playing out before them. It’s both that these creatures all existed at the same time, and a sequence of interactions that have been frozen for more than 100 million years, like a comic book panel that’s been sitting in the ground waiting to be read.
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