Overview
- A team led by Dr. Gregory Funston published a peer‑reviewed description this week in Nature Communications of a new species, Infernogallus jamesi, based on an unusually complete skull and partial skeleton.
- The nearly complete, articulated skull and other bones were recovered from the Hell Creek Formation and are now on public display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
- CT reconstructions reveal modified palatal bones and forward‑facing jaw muscles that would have driven a back‑and‑forth beak motion suited to mashing soft fruit rather than the up‑and‑down bite seen in many other dinosaurs.
- Authors say the anatomy is comparable to fruit‑eating parrots and some mammals, and they argue Infernogallus could have acted as a seed‑disperser, which may affect interpretations of flowering‑plant spread in the Late Cretaceous.
- The find shows caenagnathid theropods could evolve away from carnivory toward specialized plant‑based diets and it expands debate about how diverse and ecologically varied dinosaurs were before the end‑Cretaceous extinction.