Two pterosaur fossils from China dating to the Late Jurassic, with green arrows indicating the pellets; the yellow arrows indicate fish scales.Credit...Jiang et al., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2022
The New York Times Trilobite column has a story about some Chinese pterosaurs. A paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B details the discovery of gut contents in the remains of two pterosaur fossil found in China. The animals lived during the late Jurassic about 160 million years ago.
Fur, bones, feathers and scales can be murder on the digestion. So predators that gulp their prey down whole face a conundrum: What do you do with the indigestible bits? Owls and other birds of prey cough up anything unusable. If you’ve been to a science museum, you may have dissected one of the products of these digestive outbursts, known as owl pellets.
It appears that flying predators were coughing up big pellets in the dinosaur era, too. In a paper published on Monday in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Chinese paleontologists announced the discovery of a pair of pterosaurs, each preserved in fine detail — along with the pellets leftover from parts of their meals. The find adds another animal to the history of life that spit out food it couldn’t digest.
According to Shunxing Jiang, a paleontologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an author on the study, some researchers had suspected that pterosaurs might be capable of producing pellets, considering their close evolutionary relationship with dinosaurs, which also left pellets in the fossil record. But none had ever been found.
