But the earliest members of this group looked pretty different from Mononykus.

但这个群体最早的成员看起来与单爪蜥截然不同。

Now, Mononykus was a theropod, a group of dinosaurs famous for being fierce predators -- picture T. rex or a Velociraptor.

现在，Mononykus 是一种兽脚亚目恐龙，一群以凶猛的食肉动物而闻名的恐龙——想象一下霸王龙或迅猛龙。

Today, we call it Mononykus, and it was a little over a meter long and light-bodied thanks to its hollow bones.

今天，我们称它为 Mononykus，由于它的中空骨骼，它的长度超过一米，而且身体很轻。

Not only that, but in Mononykus, carnivorous teeth had been replaced by tiny, simple teeth like those of some ant-eating mammals today, including aardvarks.

不仅如此，在单爪龙中，食肉动物的牙齿已被微小而简单的牙齿所取代，就像今天一些食蚁哺乳动物（包括土豚）的牙齿一样。

And those second and third fingers had all but disappeared on many species, including Alvarezsaurus in Argentina and Mononykus in Mongolia, leaving just one functional large-clawed finger.

许多物种的第二根和第三根手指几乎消失了，包括阿根廷的阿尔瓦雷兹龙和蒙古的单爪龙，只剩下一根功能正常的大爪手指。

Mononykus belonged to a group of dinosaurs called the alvarezsaurs, which are thought to have originated in Asia and would ultimately include 21 species over time.

Mononykus 属于一组称为 alvarezsaurs 的恐龙，它们被认为起源于亚洲，随着时间的推移最终将包括 21 个物种。

Well, it looks like Mononykus and its relatives might've carved out their own ecological niche - one that only really became possible with the rise of social insects, like ants and termites, in the Cretaceous Period.

好吧，看起来单爪龙和它的近亲可能已经开辟了自己的生态位——只有在白垩纪时期，随着蚂蚁和白蚁等群居昆虫的兴起，这种生态位才真正成为可能。