Poor Chromeornis funkyi. What an embarrassing way to go. Those who have not brushed up on their Latin names for bird species that have been extinct for hundreds of millions of years, Chromeornis funkyi is a newly identified bird. The remains of one were just found, and its throat was filled with 800 rocks.
Researchers from Chicago’s Field Museum spotted the fossil at China’s Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature. Using a microscope, associate curator Dr. Jingmai O’Connor noticed that the bird had a mass of stones in its esophagus. That’s something he had never seen before in any throat of any animal fossilized remains he had observed in the past.
Now, there could have been a reasonable explanation for this. A gizzard stone is a rock swallowed by an animal to help it digest food that its teeth can’t properly grind down. Tons of modern-day animals do it, and some bird species have been known to swallow rocks to aid digestion.
At first, the team thought they had stumbled upon the earliest known example of gizzard stones in this group of birds. But when a CT scan showed over 800 pebbles stuffed into the bird’s esophagus, they knew that couldn’t be it. That’s a preposterous amount of gizzard stones.
Ancient Bird Died By Choking On 800 Rocks
For starters, some weren’t even real stones but rather little clay pellets. Also, no bird, ancient or modern, would ever cram themselves with that many stones. So why did it swallow so many of them?
All the researchers have are theories. The leading theory is that the bird was sick. O’Connor thinks this particular 125-million-year-old bird may have eaten too many pebbles and then, in a panic, tried to puke them up all at once. They got jammed in its throat, and it died in the least dignified way possible.
Thankfully, while the bird’s possible cause of death is a bit mortifying, the bird itself does hold a wee bit of significance. It belonged to a lineage of early birds that were dominant before that mean old asteroid wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. This little bird will help researchers better understand why some species thrived and others didn’t.
As for its name, Chromeornis funkyi, it’s a nod to the Canadian electro-funk Chromeo.
On Instagram, the band joked that while they are honored, “this is the first time someone’s called a dinosaur.”
The post Prehistoric Bird Swallowed 800 Rocks and Choked to Death—But Why? appeared first on VICE.
