Dinosaur-era bird found with 800 stones jammed in its throat: It ate them all. Why?

Palaeontologists were left scratching their heads when they came across a fossil of an ancient bird that died from eating rocks, over 800 of them. This creature lived 120 million years ago and was classified as a new species of bird by the researchers at the Field Museum. Named Chromeornis funkyi, or a “Funky Chromeo bird,” it was basically a dinosaur and was discovered at the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in China. The most striking thing about the fossil is the reason for this bird's death. It had swallowed over 800 rocks and died of suffocation. Scientists cannot explain why it would eat so many rocks. The discovery will be discussed in an upcoming paper in Palaeontologia Electronica.

Field Museum curator Jingmai O’Connor led a team of researchers who came across the Chromeornis fossil while scanning through the bird fossil collection at the museum. Gizmodo reported that they saw a tiny chunk of rock, about the size of a sparrow, preserving a fossil that in turn looked like a larger bird species called Longipteryx. It had similarly big teeth at the end of its beak, "but it’s a tiny little guy," she said, adding that this was a clue that it was a new species.

However, what was even more strange was what they found in its oesophagus. There was “an unusual mass of stones” inside it, going all the way up against its neck bones.

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They further analysed the composition and the placement of the rocks and found that the creature swallowed those stones, and they did not gather there during fossilisation. Birds like owls and chickens are known to eat rocks, which are ground up in a muscular organ called the gizzard. But O’Connor noted that of all the fossils of birds of the same group, “none have ever been found with gizzard stones.”

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Why did the bird eat the rocks?

“We found over 800 tiny stones in this bird’s throat—way more than we would have expected in other birds with gizzards,” O’Connor said in the statement to the publication. Not all of them were rocks, but some were "more like tiny clay balls." The researchers think this bird was likely sick, and so started eating rocks. “It swallowed too many, and it tried to regurgitate them in one big mass. But the mass of stones was too big, and it got lodged in the oesophagus," she said.

Birds from the same group as Chromeornis were the most populous group towards the end of the dinosaur era. The asteroid killed all dinosaurs 66 million years ago, except the birds that could fly. O’Connor says that learning about how they managed to survive, and yet were vulnerable, can help predict the course of the current cycle of mass extinction."