Picture it: Two hungry pterosaurs, one grownup and one juvenile, settle right down to dig in to a scrumptious lunch of fish. Down their gullets the entire fish go. Somewhat later, again up come the scales and different indigestible fishy bits, vomited neatly as millimeter-sized pellets.
Scientists now have the primary fossilized proof that pterosaur eating included a last course of regurgitation, scientifically known as antiperistalsis. While learning two specimens of Kunpengopterus sinensis, a pterosaur species that lived in what’s now China between 199 million and 146 million years in the past, researchers discovered a gastric pellet containing fossilized fish scales preserved alongside every particular person, they report February 7 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
That pterosaurs gave these inedible bits the previous heave-ho isn’t a shock. The flying reptiles’ household tree is stuffed with gastric pellet–expelling species, from dwelling birds similar to owls and gulls to fossilized cousins like historical crocodilians and non-avian dinosaurs.
But the research does assist flesh out what little is thought about pterosaur weight loss program and digestion (SN: 7/22/21). It reveals that members of this species, not less than, had been fish eaters. (Other probably tree-climbing members of the genus Kunpengopterus might have dined on bugs (SN: 4/14/21).) The discover additionally means that, like trendy birds, these pterosaurs had two-part stomachs: an acid-secreting half to dissolve the meals, and a muscular gizzard to compact the indigestible bits right into a pellet.
Based on the scale of the scales within the bigger pellet, discovered subsequent to the grownup, the fish it was consuming was a lot bigger than most fish fossils discovered on the website, the researchers observe. That means that relatively than opportunistically scavenging any fish that washed up onshore, Okay. sinensis might have been a hunter, actively selecting the biggest prey it may catch.