Jaime Bran Sarmiento (illustration); "Trophic Interactions of Sharks and Crocodylians with a Sea Cow (Sirenia) from the Miocene of Venezuela," by A. Benites-Palomino, in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Published online August 29, 2024 (original publication); ( CC BY 4.
0 ). The circle of life is beautiful and gruesome—sometimes so gruesome that it makes the fossil record downright macabre, millions of years after the fact. That's what happened with an ancient manateelike animal whose remains were uncovered in western Venezuela in 2019.
The specimen didn't draw much interest at first; it isn't particularly well preserved. But as scientists looked closer, they realized the creature's skull parts and vertebrae were riddled with bite marks—from two very different mouths. "As soon as you start to take a look at the details, you realize that there is something really special about the animal," says Aldo Benites-Palomino, a final-year Ph.
D. student in paleontology at the University of Zurich. He's a co-author of a paper published on August 29 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology that reports the find and uses the fossilized evidence of violence to start piecing together how species interacted in this little-studied region of South America.
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