00:00When dinosaurs walked the Earth, our planet was a much different and no doubt scarier place.
00:09And while one might imagine a giant T-Rex stomping around and eating everything in sight,
00:13experts now say that this fossil has shed some light on one of the Cretaceous period's fiercest predators.
00:18This fossil includes not only a skeleton of another predator,
00:21one that was fossilized during mortal combat with another,
00:24but also one that's called Reponomimus robustus,
00:26which science alert likens to essentially a prehistoric opossum.
00:30The creature lived between 125 and 101 million years ago in what is now Asia.
00:36Experts say they were aware this creature might have attacked dinosaurs that were much smaller than itself,
00:40but this shows it likely went after much larger prey.
00:43Not only that, but this is also some of the earliest evidence showing a mammal preying on a dinosaur.
00:48That's because when mammals first began roaming the planet, they were very small.
00:52Most of them were closer to the size of something like a modern-day rat or shrew.
00:55A far cry from other modern-day varieties like elephants that actually rival the size of dinosaurs.
01:00In fact, here is an artist's rendition of what this ancient opossum might have looked like
01:04after downing its much larger prey before molten rock from a volcano overtook them.
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