Fossils

Cannibalistic dinosaurs? Read:

“Eat or be eaten” may have been the mantra for Majungatholus atopus, a large, two-footed carnivorous dinosaur with a bump on its head that roamed Madagascar, the island off the southeast coast of Africa, about 65 million years ago.

Analysis of bones scored by tooth marks suggests Majungatholus was a cannibal that regularly dined on members of its own species and other dinosaurs. The rare, tooth-marked bones are the best evidence to date for a behavior probably common among dinosaurs but difficult to prove.

“I don’t think this should be unexpected, but because of the nature of the fossil record we get such a limited window on this type of phenomenon. We have such a small sample of what really went down,” said Raymond Rogers, a geologist at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The really fascinating question is, what’s an archeologist doing using the phrase “what really went down?”