A huge herd of dinosaurs resembling today’s birds tragically died tragically trapped in a swamp on the fringes of a lake in today’s Gobi Desert (China) 90 million years ago .
Its fossils have provided Chinese and American paleontologists investigating the site with a curious snapshot of the social behavior of those species. The herd, made up of only young specimens, between 1 and 7 years old , of the dinosaur Sinornithomimus dongi , suggests that immature individuals in a herd were left to fend for themselves when adults had to worry about raising new offspring.
The skeletons showed the same state of preservation and most looked in the same direction, suggesting that they died together in a short time . In addition, since their hind legs were trapped in the mud and some were missing the bones of the hip, the meatiest area, scientists have concluded that they were attacked by a scavenger or predator shortly after their death. The marks in the mud around the skeletons indicate that they tried to escape with all their might.
The findings were published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica . For its dissemination to the general public, two complete specimens of Sinornithomimus dongi have been reconstructed that even keep in their stomach the stones used to digest their food and the remains of their last meal, composed of plants that have not been identified because there were no traces of pollen.
