Ancient Bird Coughed Up 'Fishy' Pellet 120 Million Years Ago

[Judi Lynn]

Ancient Bird Coughed Up 'Fishy' Pellet 120 Million Years Ago

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An artist's interpretation of the newfound type of ancient bird, showing one bird eating a fish and the other expelling a pellet of fish bones.

Credit: Courtesy of Min Wang


SALT LAKE CITY — About 120 million years ago, a bird dunked its beak into the water, caught a fish and, after digesting the meal, coughed up a pellet full of fish bones. The bird died moments later, but now its fossils are the oldest evidence of a bird pellet on record, a new study reported.

The pellet — the first that is unambiguously from a bird that lived during the Mesozoic, the age of the dinosaurs — indicates that thehttp://www.livescience.com/56677-oldest-known-bird-pellet-discovered.html ancient bird had a two-chambered stomach, much like birds do today, the researchers said.

Modern-day birds, including many birds of prey, produce pellets made up of indigestible material, such as bones, hair and feathers.

"The very presence of the gastric pellet in the new specimen indicates that some key features of the modern birds' digestive systemhad already appeared in these early Cretaceous birds over 120 million years ," said the study's lead author, Min Wang, an associate professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (The Cretaceous Period was the last part of the Mesozoic Era and spanned from 145 million years ago to about 66 million years ago.)

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