![]() With such large broods, “you could imagine, at certain times of year, depending upon the species and when their breeding season is, this would not be an uncommon prey for predators,” Zelenitsky says. Oviraptorosaur nests typically contained at least 30 or more eggs. “With the discovery of this remarkable specimen, we have direct, irrefutable evidence of not only what this species was snacking on,” Zanno says, “but the gory details of how it went about it.” He suggests these legs may have been “the meatiest part” of the animal and wonders, with a laugh, if perhaps this Gorgosaurus “didn’t want to be bothered having to cough up some feathers.” Gorgosaurus probably “dismembered the small prey, swallowed the legs and left the rest of the body out there,” Therrien says. These Citipes fossils are, she adds, “the most complete remains known for that species.” “Ironically, the tyrannosaur stomach actually protected the Citipes, enabling it to be preserved-which is quite neat,” says study co-author Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor at the University of Calgary. The oviraptorosaur legs enabled the team to identify the prey as Citipes elegans-specimens that were “extremely rare” in terms of their relatively pristine condition. And the fact that the remnants included fully articulated legs from two oviraptorosaurs of the same age, size and species suggests the animals were a favored menu item of this particular tyrannosaur. The differing amount of stomach acid etching on the prey remnants indicates the animals may have been consumed within hours or days as separate meals. A young Gorgosaurus wouldn’t be expected to attack the megaherbivores it could tackle as an adult smaller prey would make more sense.īone growth analysis revealed that this tyrannosaur was a juvenile between five to seven years old and that both of its prey had lived for less than a year. That transformation made paleontologists think the animal underwent a significant dietary shift during its lifetime. Leggy and slender with bladelike teeth in its youth, it developed into a massive apex predator as an adult, almost twice the height of a giraffe and weighing as much as an elephant. Gorgosaurus lived in the late Cretaceous period, approximately 80 million to 66 million years ago. Credit: Copyrights Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology Gorgosaurus skeleton left view showing location of stomach contents. “Direct evidence of diet in dinosaurs is frustratingly rare,” says Lindsay Zanno, head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and an associate research professor at North Carolina State University, who was not involved in the new research. The circumstances that can lead to the fossil preservation of stomach contents are unusual: an animal would need to die before the complete digestion of prey and then be rapidly buried by mud or another medium. Bones found near one tyrannosaur fossil have also been interpreted as stomach contents. Such inferences have been based on things like fossils’ skull and tooth structure, bite marks on megaherbivores’ fossils and at least one coprolite, or fossilized feces. (The family includes this species’ more famous cousin Tyrannosaurus rex.) Before the new fossil find, scientists could only infer anything about the tyrannosaur diet. The study examines remnants of two small oviraptorosaur- feathered dinosaurs with a toothless beak-that were found in the stomach of a young Gorgosaurus libratus, a type of tyrannosaurid. He called it “the discovery of his life,” according to study co-author François Therrien, the museum’s curator of dinosaur palaeoecology. This remarkable discovery gives insights into the tyrannosaur diet and the animal’s place in ancient ecosystems, both of which have previously only been hypothesized about.ĭarren Tanke, a fossil preparator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta, found the specimen in the province’s Dinosaur Provincial Park and delicately removed it from the rock in which it was encased. The fossilized stomach contents of one member of this dinosaur family were described in a new study published on Friday in Science Advances. ![]() For the first time, scientists have unearthed direct proof of what a tyrannosaur-often thought of as the epitome of fearsome predators-actually ate.
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