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Fur, bones, feathers and scales can kill digestion. After swallowing their prey whole, hunters face a puzzle: What do you do with indigestible parts? Owls and other birds of prey will cough up anything that cannot be used. If you’ve ever been to a science museum, you may have examined one of the products of these digestive blasts known as owl pellets.
It seems that in the dinosaur age, flying predators also produced large pellets. In An article published on Monday In the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Chinese paleontologists announced the discovery of a pair of pterosaurs, each preserved in fine detail, along with leftover pellets from their meals. The find adds another animal to its life history that spits out food it can’t digest.
According to Shunxing Jiang, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-author of the study, some researchers suspected that pterosaurs might have produced lumps, given their close evolutionary relationship with dinosaurs, which left lumps in the fossil record. But none were found.
The team studied a well-preserved pair of Kunpengopterus, a long-beaked toothy fly that lived in forests along lake shores in the late Jurassic period. 160 million years ago. Specimens, one adult and one juvenile, both died and sank into deep waters where their bodies were covered with soft sediment.
The seepage at the bottom of the lake also covered large, compressed bundles of hard fish scales near the pterosaurs. Dr. Much like the lumps coughed up by modern seabirds, Jiang’s team suggested that these bundles were wider than the pelvises of pterosaurs and could not pass through the animals’ intestines.
Therefore, Dr. These must be pellets that were either coughed up just before the animals died, or expelled by the build-up of gases as the animals decomposed, Jiang said.
“We have two examples of a species with similarly sized pellets for body size. This doesn’t happen often in the study of vertebrate paleontology, particularly pterosaurs,” said Dr. Jiang. This “made our study more convincing,” continued Dr. Jiang.
The pellets offer important clues to how Kunpengopterus lived. Sometimes, fish scales and bones are preserved in a pterosaur’s body. Apart from such events, pterosaur diets are often difficult to pinpoint when paleontologists look for clues as to what they ate by comparing pterosaur beaks to the anatomies of living birds or looking at isotopic signatures in their bones.
While the toothy Kunpengopterus may be a small general predator, Dr. Jiang said at least two people ate fish before they died. The sizes of these fish meals also varied according to the size of the animal – comparing the flakes found in the pellets with flakes from whole fish, the team concluded that the juvenile pterosaur ate average-sized fish, while the adult swallowed something rather large. .
Dr. Jiang said the size difference in the contents of the pellets is similar to the habits of adult seabirds that go after the biggest fish they can catch. Kunpengopterus appears to prey on the same species as it grows, and the adults deal with increasingly larger fish.
The find also provides an important clue about the digestive systems of pterosaurs. Stomachs and intestines are almost never fossilized – but to regularly produce stomach lumps, an animal usually needs to have both a two-piece stomach and an efficient process for expelling material from the digestive tract. Dr. Although at least one Cretaceous pterosaur showed evidence of a two-part stomach, the presence of pellets in a much older member of the family challenged the possible evolution of this digestive anatomy millions of years ago, Jiang said.
And some other members of the Archosaur family—like certain crocodiles, dinosaurs, and modern birds—also had lumps, two-piece stomachs, and the ability to cough up indigestible parts in neat packages might have been a common feature in the larger archosaur family.
Dr. “Our knowledge of pterosaurs is quite limited due to the rarity of fossils,” Jiang said. “This finding shows us the possibilities.”
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