About 120 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous period, the Earth's jungles first began to burst with the colors of blooming flowers. As the remnants of the supercontinent Pangaea drifted towards their present locations, a diverse array of dinosaurs roamed these changing landscapes. Towering behemoths like Spinosaurus and the smaller, yet ferocious Utahraptor were among the era's dominant predators.
Contrasting these colossal beings, prehistoric mammals, mostly small and inconspicuous, lurked in the shadows, overlooked, and underestimated.
At least, that’s been paleontology’s long-held view of the ancient food web, until recently. A study by Canadian and Chinese scientists, focusing on a fossil discovered in China's Liaoning Province, has dramatically rewritten our understanding of what ancient mammals were capable of.
