Age: 74 million years
Location: Mongolian Dinosaur Museum, Ulan BatorThey 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 …