Jan. 31 (UPI) --An archosaur species named Smok wawelski was crushing bones 140 million years before the first tyrannosaurids arrived in North America, new research says. Most dinosaurs used razor ...

QvarnstroÌ?m and his colleagues compared Smok's bone-biting eating style to that of a hyena, which is also similar to the tyrannosaurids of the Late Cretaceous, but strangely unlike modern archosaurs ...

image: Coprolites, or fossil droppings, of the dinosaur-like archosaur Smok wawelski contain lots of chewed-up bone fragments. This led researchers at Uppsala University to conclude that this top ...

Fossil faeces of the bone-crushing archosaur Smok, with a Smok reconstruction in the background. Martin Qvarnström, researcher, Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University Grzegorz ...

Despite being touted as an Allosaurus ancestor shortly after its discovery, in the new paper Smok is simply called “a new large predatory archosaur.” This is a very general statement.

The Smok wawelski is in the archosaur family, who are represented today by crocodiles. Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden concluded that the predator was eating bones for salt and marrow.

(Credit: Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki) Coprolite from Smok: Fossil faeces of the bone-crushing archosaur Smok, with a Smok reconstruction in the background. Illustration: Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki Scientists can ...

Smok (which translates to "dragon" in Polish) was a large, bipedal species of archosaur (a group of egg-laying animals that includes birds, crocodiles and dinosaurs) that lived about 140 million years ...

A set of Triassic archosaur fossils, excavated in the 1960s in Tanzania, have been formally recognized as a distinct species, representing one of the earliest-known members of the crocodile ...

Qvarnström and his colleagues compared Smok's bone-biting eating style to that of a hyena, which is also similar to the tyrannosaurids of the Late Cretaceous, but strangely unlike modern archosaurs – ...