Dinosaur bones made a handy food supplement

In life, dinosaurs struck terror into the mammals they lived alongside. In death, they provided them with a handy source of calcium.

That's the conclusion of palaeontologists who have reinvestigated tooth marks found on dinosaur bones.

It was previously thought that these marks were made solely by other dinosaurs. The distinctive bites of tyrannosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex and its smaller relatives, are common on late Cretaceous fossils from Alberta in Canada, says Nick Longrich of Yale University. "If you go through fossil collections at random, you'll see a fair percentage with bite marks from tyrannosaurs."

But two bones dating back 75 million years at the Royal Tyrrell Musuem in Drumheller, Alberta, have different markings, Longrich discovered. These suggested that animals with pairs of closely spaced incisors in their upper and lower jaws had dug into the bones in the same way a person's teeth dig into corn on the cob.

The size and separation of the scratches indicated the animals were mammals similar in size to a modern chipmunk or squirrel.

Ceratosaurus Dinosaur

Ceratosaurus means ' horned reptile.' It was discovered by O.C Marsh in 18184. There are 3 classification, Saurischia, Theropoda and Ceratosauridae and it remains found in North America and East Africa.

These have a dimension of 6 metre length, 2 metres height and 900 kilograms weight. There food was carnivore.

Ceratosaurus was a strange dinosaur distinguished by several little horns on its skull. A larger one on the nostrils and two smaller ones above the eyes. Its teeth were barbed anusually large.
Along the back and tail was a kind of crest consisting of small, bony nodules.
Ceratosaurus was a biped and the front limbs had hands with four digits.