An illustration of Longipteryx, a fossil bird with unusually strong teeth right at the tip of its beak. Credit: Ville Sinkkonen.
Phys.org has a piece about birds with teeth. As rare as hen's teeth is only a phrase for modern times... back in the Mezozoic - sometimes referred to as the "Age of Reptiles", many birds had teeth. Longipteryx chaoyangensis is the subject of a new paper in the journal Current Biology. L. chaoyangensis lived during the early Cretaceous Period about 120 million years ago. Researchers at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, IL, found fossilized seed in the stomach of a specimen of L. chaoyangensis. This discovery calls into question the hypothesis that toothed birds ate only fish and insects.
For paleontologists who study animals that lived long ago, fossilized remains tell only part of the story of an animal's life. While a well-preserved skeleton can provide hints at what an ancient animal ate or how it moved, irrefutable proof of these behaviors is hard to come by. But sometimes, scientists luck out with extraordinary fossils that preserve something beyond the animal's body.
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"Longipteryx is one of my favorite fossil birds, because it's just so weird— it has this long skull, and teeth only at the tip of its beak," says Jingmai O'Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles in the Field Museum's Neguanee Integrative Research Center and the study's lead author.
