NEW YORK, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- New York's American Museum of Natural History Wednesday unveiled a 130-million-year-old fossil of a dinosaur found in the belly of a large primitive mammal.
According to the museum, this is the first fossil that shows early mammals were carnivorous and fed on small vertebrates, including dinosaurs; in this case, the dino dinner was a remarkably preserved juvenile called a psittacosaur.
The fossil of an oppossum-sized mammal called Repenomamus robustus was discovered in China and is described in a new paper in the journal, Nature.
The last meal of the R. robustus specimen was discovered after the fossil was prepared and scientists examined a small patch of bones located within the adult animal's ribcage. This turned out to be an extremely rare find, said the museum, possibly the first of its kind in a Mesozoic mammal.
The contents are the limbs, fingers, and teeth of a juvenile psittacosaur, a two-legged, parrot-beaked herbivorous dinosaur common in Liaoning Province in northeastern China where the R. robustus fossil was found.
