Tiny mammals once scavenged meat from giant dinosaur carcasses

By Michael Marshall

Getty Images/Stocktrek Images

The first mammals were small and elusive, but that didn’t stop them chowing down on dinosaur meat. A bone fragment from a giant dinosaur has bite marks that could only have been made by small mammals, which probably scavenged the carcass.

“This is the earliest direct evidence for mammalian feeding behaviour,” says Felix Augustin of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany.

The bone fragment came from the long neck of a giant sauropod dinosaur, which lived in what is now China in the …