Infernogallus Skull Offers Clues to a Fruit-Eating Dinosaur

A toothless dinosaur about the size of a turkey. The opening paragraph describes a turkey-sized, toothless dinosaur found in the United States.

Clue: The skull of a turkey-sized dinosaur called Infernogallus jamesi may reveal an unusual adaptation for feeding on fruit. The toothless animal lived around 66 million years ago, and its fossils were found in the Hell Creek Formation in the United States.

They used the skull’s shape to reconstruct possible jaw muscle action. The second paragraph explains that skull shape was used to reconstruct how the jaw muscles could have worked.

Clue: Researchers used the shape of the skull to reconstruct how its jaw muscles could have worked. They propose that a back-and-forth chewing movement helped it process soft food, drawing comparisons with some fruit-eating birds.

It is an interpretation of anatomy, not a directly observed meal. The final paragraph explicitly distinguishes the anatomical interpretation from a directly observed meal.

Clue: The diet is an interpretation of anatomy rather than a directly observed meal. The team published the study in Nature Communications on October 10; Stony Brook University highlighted it on October 28, followed by Reuters coverage on October 30.