Fighting Dinosaurs

It preserves a Protoceratops andrewsi and Velociraptor mongoliensis trapped in combat about 74 million years ago[1] and provides direct evidence of predatory behavior in non-avian dinosaurs.

In that year on August 3, during the fieldwork of a team composed of paleontologists Tomasz Jerzykiewicz, Maciej Kuczyński, Teresa Maryańska, Edward Miranowski, Altangerel Perle and Wojciech Skarżyński, several fossils of Protoceratops and Velociraptor were found at the Tugriken Shire locality (Djadokhta Formation) including a block containing a pair of them.

[4] In 1974, Mongolian paleontologist Rinchen Barsbold suggested that the quicksand-like bottom of a lake could have kept them together or that both animals fell into a swamp-like waterbody, making the last moments of their fight underwater.

[5] In 1993, Polish paleontologist Halszka Osmólska proposed that during the death struggle a large dune may have collapsed, simultaneously burying both Protoceratops and Velociraptor.

[7] In 1998, Kenneth Carpenter suggested another scenario in which the multiple wounds delivered by the Velociraptor on the Protoceratops throat had the latter animal bleeding to death.

[3] In 2016 Barsbold reported several anomalies within the Protoceratops individual: both coracoids have small bone fragments indicative of a breaking of the pectoral girdle, and the right forelimb and scapulocoracoid are torn off to the left and backwards, relative to its torso.

Barsbold suggested that scavengers were the most likely authors of these anomalies since the Protoceratops is missing other body elements and this event likely occurred after the death of both animals or during a point where movement was not possible.