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Fossilized chew marks recommend there might have been a dramatic tussle between a big terror fowl and an much more huge crocodile round 12 million years in the past.
Phorusrhacids, generally often known as “terror birds,” had been apex predators that terrorized prey within the historical ecosystems of South America. Whereas these flightless carnivores had little to worry on land, a brand new examine, printed Tuesday (July 22) within the journal Biology Letters, signifies that they weren’t essentially protected round water.
Researchers analyzed tooth marks on the leg bone of one of many largest terror birds ever found — estimated to have stood greater than 9 ft (2.7 meters) tall — unearthed on the La Venta fossil web site in Colombia. The crew concluded {that a} 15-foot-long (4.7 meter) caiman was possible accountable for the marks.
“We have now discovered that terror birds is also preyed [upon] and that even being an apex predator has dangers,” examine lead creator Andrés Hyperlink, a paleontologist and biologist on the College of the Andes in Colombia, informed Dwell Science in an e-mail.
The examine would not rule out the likelihood that the fear fowl merely died close to a physique of water and was subsequently munched on by the caiman, making it a case of scavenging somewhat than searching.
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Researchers first unveiled the fear fowl fossil in a examine printed final yr. The examine’s authors mentioned on the time they suspected a crocodilian killed the fowl, however they hadn’t but printed an evaluation of the 4 tooth marks discovered on the bone.
For the brand new examine, the researchers evaluated the chew mark by creating detailed 3D photographs of the fossil. The bone marks had no indicators of therapeutic, whereas the scale and form of the marks had been in keeping with these delivered by a caiman that was round 15.1 to fifteen.8 ft (4.6 to 4.8 m) lengthy, based on the examine.
The crew hypothesized that La Venta’s largest historical caiman species, Purussaurus neivensis, was behind the chew. Nevertheless, the person accountable would have been a subadult, and never but absolutely grown. Hyperlink informed Dwell Science that P. neivensis might develop as much as round 33 ft (10 m) lengthy. “It was a large animal!” he mentioned.
With out direct proof of the caiman consuming the fear fowl, the findings symbolize an anecdotal account of an aquatic apex predator feeding on a land apex predator through the center of the Miocene epoch (23 million to five million years in the past).
“For my part this examine contributes to understanding the food regimen of Purussaurus, the panorama of worry close to the water our bodies [at] La Venta through the center Miocene and the complicated ecological interactions within the protoAmazonian ecosystems of [tropical] South America,” Hyperlink mentioned.
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