Some 245 million years ago, a small marine reptile died. Now, researchers have found its astonishingly well-preserved body, complete with an almost intact stomach, liver, and intestines. According to a new study published in Science Advances, the fossil offers the oldest known example of a preserved digestive system in any reptile.
It’s called an Austronaga minuta, and it was about 2 feet long and swam the warm, shallow waters of the ancient Tethys Sea way before the dinosaurs. It had a long neck for snatching fish, paddle-like limbs for navigating, and a powerful tail for propulsion.
But all that stuff takes a backseat to the real discovery here: researchers identified a simple, single-chambered stomach, a liver that still has a little bit of reddish color thanks to traces of iron-rich hemoglobin, and a relatively straight intestine. They even found tiny fish scales preserved in the gut, confirming that the last thing it ate before it perished was seafood… which maybe wasn’t the hardest thing to guess given that it lived in the sea.
The Ancient Reptile Shared a Few Traits With Modern Crocodiles
The single-chambered stomach is a simplified version of the more complex two-chambered stomachs seen in modern crocodiles, birds, and even some dinosaurs that evolved later on. This thing was chugging along just fine while carrying around a pretty basic set of digestive tools that evolution would later improve upon.
The fossil was found in China’s Yunnan Province, a place where, if you know anything about archaeology, is a gold mine for studying long-deceased creatures. The find gives researchers the best look at how early marine reptiles functioned internally, a rare treat since most of those soft tissues rot away relatively quickly, rarely leaving behind any traces. And now, researchers have gotten their hands on one that seems to be loaded with organs like a quarter-billion-year-old scientific piñata just waiting to be broken open.
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