In a imagination - scarce ancient Colorado athirst dinosaurs would go to extreme length for solid food , even if that meant wipe out one of their own , a new work has found .

Researchers from the University of Tennessee , Knoxville , discovered that a substantial amount of fossils from the Mygatt - Moore Quarry , which go steady back to the late Jurassic Period around 150 million years ago , bear bite St. Mark from carnivoroustheropods . These type of Saint Mark are typically rare as the carnivore usually targeted softer tissues , but in this prey , most 29 percent of the 2,368 bones probe had theropod tooth indentations .

report   inPLOS ONE , the authors suspect , from the chassis and nature of these markings , that   the predominant theropod culprit is likely the magnanimous predatorAllosaurus . The most abundant theropod in the quarry , its serrate teeth are consistent with the bulk of the bites , although its competitorCeratosaurusmay also be creditworthy .

The fact that these meat - eat animals eat up other dinosaurs is n’t surprising , but what is of interest is the type of dinos they labour their teeth into . Whilst primarily the quarry fossils showed that the predators munched on herbivores , 17 pct of the bites were in fact on other theropod finger cymbals . Of these marks , around half were on less nutritious dead body share .

All the grounds points towards a distressed ecosystem that force theropods to salvage through the decomposed clay of former kills . This scarceness of intellectual nourishment may also have propel the carnivorous dinosaur to turn on each other , which would excuse the theropod - on - theropod bite mark found by researchers . If so , this would supply rare evidence for dinosaur cannibalism , and would be the first know example of this deportment in Allosaurus .

“ Big bird-footed dinosaur like Allosaurus plausibly were n’t peculiarly picky eater , particularly if their environs were already strapped for resources , ” Dr Stephanie Drumheller , lead author from the University of Tennessee , say in astatement . “ Scavenging and even cannibalism were by all odds on the table . ”

But Allosaurus is not the only dinosaur criminate of cannibalism . “ Very deep grooves ” antecedently   found onTyrannosaurus rexbones from the Lance Formation , Wyoming , suggests that one of their own gnawed forth on its numb body .