But archaeological sites filled with butchered mammoth bones can give researchers a peek into more than just the animals people liked to hunt, says Hannah Moots, an archaeologist at the Center for Paleogenetics in Stockholm and the study’s lead author.
“These mammoth bone accumulation sites preserve some of the richest evidence we have of Ice Age life,” she says, “including mammoth bone structures, sophisticated ivory and stone artifacts, and early figurative art, such as the Venus of Dolní Věstonice.”
This illustration imagines a prehistoric food chain involving a pterosaur, an ichthyosaur, and Kronosaurus queenslandicus.
Dr. Peter Trusler
Pterducken?!!
The Bahariya Oasis wasn’t the only place where massive prehistoric predators faced off in a royal rumble: In the Australian outback, paleontologists recently came across a fossilized food chain in action involving three 100-million-year-old carnivorous reptiles: a pterosaur that was eaten by a sea monster known as an ichthyosaur, which was in turn eaten by an even bigger, 40-foot sea monster known as a Kronosaurus!
“We could assume such interactions did occur,” says Matt White, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia and an author of the study, which was published recently in Gondwana Research. “We just never found the evidence.”
It makes me think of that Star Wars line “There’s always a bigger fish”—or marine reptile, in this case.