Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Moderna, Italy.
American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA.
PeerJ. 2023 Nov 14;11:e16327. doi: 10.7717/peerj.16327. eCollection 2023.
Tooth-marked bones provide important evidence for feeding choices made by extinct carnivorous animals. In the case of the dinosaurs, most bite traces are attributed to the large and robust osteophagous tyrannosaurs, but those of other large carnivores remain underreported. Here we report on an extensive survey of the literature and some fossil collections cataloging a large number of sauropod bones (68) from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of the USA that bear bite traces that can be attributed to theropods. We find that such bites on large sauropods, although less common than in tyrannosaur-dominated faunas, are known in large numbers from the Morrison Formation, and that none of the observed traces showed evidence of healing. The presence of tooth wear in non-tyrannosaur theropods further shows that they were biting into bone, but it remains difficult to assign individual bite traces to theropod taxa in the presence of multiple credible candidate biters. The widespread occurrence of bite traces without evidence of perimortem bites or healed bite traces, and of theropod tooth wear in Morrison Formation taxa suggests preferential feeding by theropods on juvenile sauropods, and likely scavenging of large-sized sauropod carcasses.
齿痕骨骼为已灭绝的肉食动物的觅食选择提供了重要证据。就恐龙而言，大多数咬痕都归因于大型强壮的食骨暴龙类，但其他大型肉食动物的咬痕仍然报道较少。在这里，我们对文献和一些化石收藏进行了广泛的调查，这些收藏对来自美国上侏罗统莫里森组的大量蜥脚类恐龙骨骼（68 块）进行了编目，这些骨骼上有可以归因于兽脚类恐龙的咬痕。我们发现，虽然在大型兽脚类恐龙中，这种咬伤不如在暴龙主导的动物群中常见，但在莫里森组中却有大量的咬伤记录，而且没有观察到任何愈合的痕迹。非暴龙类兽脚类恐龙的牙齿磨损的存在进一步表明它们正在咬碎骨头，但在存在多个可信的候选咬痕者的情况下，仍然难以将单个咬痕分配给兽脚类恐龙的分类单元。广泛存在的无濒死期咬伤或愈合咬伤痕迹的咬痕，以及莫里森组中兽脚类恐龙牙齿磨损的存在，表明兽脚类恐龙优先以幼年蜥脚类恐龙为食，并且可能会对大型蜥脚类恐龙尸体进行腐肉食。
