What ate dinosaurs? 谁吃了恐龙 Old crocs 古鳄鱼 Even in their heyday, dinosaurs were not quite as dominant as popular myth makes them outto be 即便是在全盛时期,恐龙并非像民间传说所理解的那样占绝对统治地位 ONE answer to the question, What ate dinosaurs? is, obviously, Other dinosaurs. The ropodpredators like Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus loom large in the imagination of every lover ofprehistoric monsters, and their animatronic fights with the likes of Diplodocus andStegosaurus are the stuff of clich. Science, though, tries to look beyond the obvious, and atthis years meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology, held in Las Vegas, some of thespeakers asked whether the top predators of the Mesozoic era really were all dinosaurs. Theirconclusion was no. Another group of reptiles, until recently neglected, were also importantcarnivores. And it is a group that is still around today: the crocodiles. 谁吃恐龙很明显,其中一个答案是:其它恐龙每个史前怪兽爱好者的脑海里浮现出的是像霸王龙、翼龙这样的兽脚类掠食者,电脑制作的它们与梁龙、剑龙的打斗也成为俗套。而科学试图不落窠臼。今年,在拉斯维加斯召开的古脊椎生物学会会议上,一些发言人问到中生代顶级掠食者是否全是恐龙,结论是否。直到最近还被忽视的一类爬虫,同样是重要的食肉动物,正是仍然存活于今的一个族群:鳄鱼。 |