In 1971, a Polish-Mongolian team in the Gobi Desert found one of the most extraordinary fossils ever recovered - and one of the few that captures a moment of animal behavior frozen in stone.
Two dinosaurs lay tangled together. A Velociraptor had jammed its sickle claw into the throat of a Protoceratops - a small, frilled plant-eater. The Protoceratops had clamped its hooked beak around the Velociraptor’s arm. Both were dead, locked in combat. They had been buried mid-fight, probably by a collapsing sand dune in a sudden sandstorm.
The fossil is now called the “Fighting Dinosaurs” and lives in a Mongolian museum. It’s some of the only direct evidence we have of dinosaurs actually behaving like the creatures we picture them as - hunting, fighting, killing each other. Most of what we know about dinosaurs is anatomy. This is action.
