Forever locked in combat (Image: David Clark/Dinosaurs Alive/IMAX Film/Giant Screen Films)
The Velociraptor and Protoceratops were engaged in a desperate struggle when they were abruptly buried by a landslide
Advertisement
Discovered: Gobi desert, Mongolia, 1971
Age: 74 million years
Location: Mongolian Dinosaur Museum, Ulan Bator
They will remain forever locked in mortal combat. The Velociraptor has sunk its deadly foot claw deep into the neck of the herbivore, a boar-sized creature called Protoceratops. This vicious attack may have hit the carotid artery – a lethal blow.
But the Protoceratops fought back. It has thrown the Velociraptor to the ground before it, and its jaws are locked on to the predator’s right arm. The bite appears to have broken the Velociraptor‘s arm. “There is no doubt these animals were fighting,” says Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who studied the fossil while it was on loan to the museum. “There is nothing else like the fighting dinosaurs, which captures direct evidence of a single instant in time.”
What happened next? One possibility is that a sand dune collapsed on them while they were still fighting for their lives. Norell thinks heavy rains had destabilised the dune, so it flowed quickly and smoothly over the pair as they fought. Elsewhere in Mongolia, he says, animals have been found trapped in their burrows by similar flows.
Or perhaps the plant-eater bled to death from the blow to its carotid artery, trapping the injured Velociraptor under its heavy body. When the predator eventually died, too, a sandstorm covered both bodies, suggests Ken Carpenter of the Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum.
He that the Protoceratops is missing both forelimbs, the left hind limb and the end of its tail. This is hard to explain if they were buried alive, but could mean that scavengers found the pair dead or mortally wounded. The tight S curve of the Velociraptor‘s neck also suggests it died before it was buried, Carpenter says. Various combinations of the two scenarios are feasible too – perhaps scavengers dug down to snatch the missing parts after the two were buried alive.
What really matters, though, is that the pair were preserved at all. Deadly duels between dinosaurs must have been an everyday event. The formidable weaponry of many meat-eaters suggests they were active predators rather than mere scavengers, but there is very little direct evidence of this. A tooth fragment found embedded in a healed tail wound, for instance, is the best evidence that T. rex hunted live prey.
So to find two dinosaurs locked in combat, in what looks like a freeze-frame from a dinosaur drama-documentary, is absolutely extraordinary. “It’s one of the best discoveries ever,” says Carpenter.
“It looks like a freeze-frame from a dinosaur drama-documentary”
“It’s just so ridiculously amazing,” agrees palaeontologist David Hone of Queen Mary University of London. It is surprising that a Velociraptor seems to have attacked an animal as big as the Protoceratops, he says, as most predators only tackle prey smaller than themselves.
The movie Jurassic Park made the name Velociraptor famous, but the terrifying predators in the film more closely resemble a much larger species called Deinonychus. Velociraptor was in fact quite small: 2 metres long thanks to its tail but just half a metre tall. There is no evidence these feathered fiends made up for their small size by hunting packed in hunts either. The Protoceratops was also about 2 metres from nose to tail tip, but much more heavily built. “The Protoceratops was three, four, five times the weight of the Velociraptor,” says Hone.
Is it still the only example of its kind, though? A fossil found in 2006 in the Hell Creek formation of Montana contains bones from a tyrannosaur-like predator and a Triceratops-like plant eater. It was dubbed the “duelling dinosaurs” by its private owners and put up for auction for $7 million in 2013, but did not sell.
Yet the Hell Creek rocks were deposited in flowing water, so Norell thinks it more likely that the two dinosaurs were washed together by a flood than that they fought to the death. For now, then, the Mongolian fighting dinosaurs remain unique.
Read more: “Stunning fossils: The seven most amazing ever found”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Amazing fossils: Dinosaurs discovered mid-fight”
