Page 49 - Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong
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When animals eat a particular type of food, their diet can be recorded in the shape of their mouths, teeth and other parts of their body. A number of theropods ‘specialised’ to eat different sorts of food – not just other dinosaurs . . .
Although ALBERTONYKUS had very, very short arms, they were extremely strong. This small theropod might have used its claws to rip open rotting wood to get to tasty insects inside – just like how giant anteaters crack into termite mounds today.
Some dinosaurs had more mysterious mouths. What MASIAKASAURUS ate is, for now, a mystery as no animal has teeth that stick out quite like this today.
The humpbacked DEINOCHEIRUS was a mystery for 50 years when only its arms
and blunt claws had been found. Eventually more of its skeleton was discovered and its wide mouth and the remains of its meals showed that it ate fish and plants – so it probably lived on riverbanks or beside lakes.
So not all theropods ate meat, and some of them looked very strange! We need to keep digging to discover more about animals we still don’t quite understand – like MAJUNGASAURUS and MASIAKASAURUS. It took palaeontologists a long time to find out what D E I N O C H E I R U S ’s arms were attached to, so sometimes patience pays off!
MAJUNGASAURUS lived on what is now the island of Madagascar and some of their fossilised bones have been discovered with bite marks in them from other MAJUNGASAURUS. Were they scavenging members of their species that had already died? Or did these animals live – at least sometimes – as cannibals?
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