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Researchers from Stony Brook University, the Royal Ontario Museum and the North Dakota Geological Survey describe a turkey-sized dinosaur adapted to eating fruit, based on fossils from Montana and North Dakota.
Palaeontologists have described a newly named dinosaur species, Infernogallus jamesi, whose name translates as “hell chicken.” The turkey-sized dinosaur lived around 66 million years ago during the Cretaceous era, when Tyrannosaurus rex and velociraptors also lived on Earth.
The discovery was made by a team of researchers from Stony Brook University, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the North Dakota Geological Survey. They studied fossils uncovered in the US states of Montana and North Dakota. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications and was based on analysis of five specimens.
Infernogallus was about 1.5 metres long and weighed around 12 kilograms (26 pounds).
ScienceAlert reports that the species seems to have been one of the first known “frugivorous” dinosaurs. Thomas Dudgeon, an evolutionary biologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada, said: “It’s pretty rare for animals to become specialized for a diet of fruit, so when it happens, it comes with some remarkable adaptations.”
The dinosaur had a curved beak similar to a modern-day parrot or turtle, but with a weaker bite force than similar animals, so it was not cracking tough nuts, seeds, or shells. It had no teeth and no signs of gizzard stones were found in the gut of the most complete specimen.
CT scans showed that the muscles in the jaws were positioned in a front-to-back direction, rather than up-and-down, meaning its jaws would have moved forward and backward to grind food. The palate had a pair of bony surfaces with a complex pattern of ridges and grooves. The researchers wrote: “During anteroposterior movement of the mandible, contact between the highly textured upper and lower jaws would have provided a mechanism for shearing, mashing, or crushing soft foods, similar to a mortar and pestle.”
Based on these features, the researchers hypothesize that Infernogallus would most likely have eaten drupes – fruits like peaches and cherries with a single large seed in the center, surrounded by soft, tasty flesh. The team traced the origin of caenagnathids, the family that Infernogallus belongs to, back to around 107 to 118 million years ago. The first drupes began to appear towards the older end of that scale, according to previous data. By the time Infernogallus appeared, around 68 to 66 million years ago, it was fully equipped for feeding on fruit.
The researchers suggest that the apparent lock-step timing of adaptations arising in caenagnathids and diversification and size increase in fruiting angiosperms are consistent with the hypothesis that oral processing of fruits formed a significant component of caenagnathid diets. The team also speculates that this highly specialized diet, which may have consisted in large part of sporadic or seasonal foods, could have contributed to the group’s downfall when primary resources collapsed at the end of the Cretaceous. Future work could investigate whether these dinosaurs actively helped spread the seeds of plants by eating their fruit.
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This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.
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