The stomach of the teenage tyrannosaur Gorgosaurus libratus is a gift that keeps on giving. A team of paleontologists in Canada found the remains of two meals preserved inside of its stomach cavity, including the partially digested drumsticks of two birdlike dinosaurs. The findings were described in a study published December 8 in the journal Science Advances and is the first known time that well-preserved gut continents have been discovered in a fossilized tyrannosaur.
[Related: The ghosts of the dinosaurs we may never discover.]
Gorgosaurus lived about 75 million years ago, or several million years before its more famous relative the Tyrannosaurus rex. In the study, the Gorgosaurus was estimated to be between five and seven years old when it died, or a teenager in dinosaur years. It probably weighed about 738 pounds, or 13 percent of the body mass of a fully grown Gorgosaurus. Adults were about 33 feet long and weighed upwards of 2,200 pounds.
The fossil was first discovered in 2009 by staff from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta. Technicians noticed strange features poking out of the fossil’s rib cage while they were preparing it. These turned out to be small toe bones. Gut contents like these are rarely preserved in dinosaur fossils, but this specimen had the dismembered remains of two herbivorous dinosaurs–Citipes elegans.
The tyrannosaur only ate the hind limbs of each tiny Citipes and they appear to be the last and second-to-last meal that the Gorgosaurus consumed before it died.
“It must have killed… both of these Citipes at different times and then ripped off the hind legs and ate those and left the rest of the carcasses,” study co-author and University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky told CNN. “Obviously this teenager had an appetite…
Read the full article here