From Nature and also in the NY Times there is news that maybe Mesozoic mammals weren't quite as mild as previously thought. You know the drill. Tiny, shrew-like mammals that scurried away from dinosaurs. Recently, researchers in Liaoning, China found 130-million-year-old mammals as large as dogs and, the kicker, one of them had eaten a baby Psittacosaurus (or so the speculation goes). These new mammals, dubbed Repenomamus giganticus (and a smaller cousin R. robustus), seem to allow mammals into new parts of the ecosystem. When you start to think about that in combination with animals such as Velociraptors and other smaller dinosaurs you really get a sense of the variety of scale that existed then. I think that ecosystem must have been quite complicated with the diversity of scale that existed then. And none of these larger animals can get away with eating things like krill.

Unfortunately, the actual article requires a subscription to Nature (which I lack) and so you only get the newsy version.

Alright, there's my random science trek for the day. Maybe something else but unlikely as I fly to San Francisco tonight.

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