"Anaconda" Meets "Jurassic Park"


Sculpture: Tyler Keillor, Photo: Ximena Erickson, Image modified by Bonnie Miljour

When University of Michigan professor Jeffrey Wilson stumbled upon fossilized dinosaur eggs, he discovered something quite remarkable - a death scene best described as "Anaconda" meets "Jurassic Park":

"It was amazing," Wilson recalls, "because we realized that not only do we have an egg, not only do we have a chain of vertebrae, but they are arranged in a coil, and on top of the coil was a skull."

The snake was coiled around the broken eggshell. "Next to that coil, eggshell, skull, was a solid egg, and another solid egg, and then some larger bones," says Wilson.

Those bones belonged to a baby sauropod. Full-grown sauropods were the vegetarian 100-ton giants of the dinosaur world. But the baby was only about a foot-and-a-half long. It had apparently just hatched from that broken egg. The snake, about 11 feet long, had been waiting for the baby to hatch in order to eat it.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124217483&ft=1&f=100


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It seems weird to me that such an event just "froze" and was captured in a fossil. What caused the snake and dino to just all the sudden die and be fossilized before decay?
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