A feathered, toothless dinosaur about the size of a turkey, found in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana, appears to have eaten fruit, according to a team led by Stony Brook University’s Gregory Funston. The animal, named Infernogallus jamesi, weighed roughly 12 kilograms, and the researchers describe it as the first known dinosaur that specifically ate fruit.
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The evidence is in its skull, which was built for a kind of chewing that dinosaurs were not supposed to do.
A small oviraptorosaur from the age of T. rex
The release from the Royal Ontario Museum, issued October 27, 2026, places Infernogallus in the Late Cretaceous, alongside T. rex and Triceratops. It belongs to the caenagnathids, a group of oviraptorosaurs, and carries the nickname “hell chicken.” Among the smallest members of its group even as an adult, it was feathered and had no teeth.
Its ancestors were meat-eaters, which makes a fruit diet a shift away from that origin. The type specimen, a nearly complete articulated skull with part of the skeleton, was collected in Montana in 2011, according to Sci.News, and additional material from Montana, South Dakota and North Dakota was assigned to the species. The fossils are on display at the museum, and the animal lived roughly 68 to 66 million years ago in the Hell Creek Formation.
Bone sections indicate the individual was at least 6 years old and fully grown, so its small size was not a matter of youth. At about 12 kilograms, it was a fraction of the weight of the better-known giants of its group.
A jaw that ground like a parrot’s
CT scans of the skull show palatal bones that arch downward into the mouth. That orientation turns certain chewing muscles to face front to back instead of up and down, allowing a sliding, human-like chew instead of a rigid vertical bite. Sci.News adds that the lower jaw could slide forward and backward by up to about 15 millimeters, with ridges and grooves on the upper and lower jaws that would have fit together as it moved.
The arrangement is rare. The release notes it in humans and in fruit-eating birds such as the vulturine parrot, and Sci.News reports the closest match is Pesquet’s parrot, a bird that mashes fruit pulp and discards the seeds. The researchers concluded the adaptations likely evolved to process soft food in the mouth rather than in the gut.
Co-author Thomas Dudgeon, a postdoctoral fellow at the museum, called the anatomy of Infernogallus “bizarre among dinosaurs.” Funston said the team never expected to discover fruit-eating dinosaurs, and senior author David Evans, the museum’s chief curator of natural history, said the find shows there is still a lot to learn about the world of T. rex.
What the evidence does and does not show
The diet is an inference from anatomy, not a stomach-contents finding. The claim to be first is the museum release’s framing of the study, and Sci.News reports the paper’s own wording is that the animal “may have” eaten fruit, with caenagnathids “likely” doing so. The reconstruction of the jaw muscles points to a weak bite, and no gastroliths, the stomach stones some plant-eating dinosaurs carried, were found in the body cavity, which fits a soft diet.
The skeleton is only partial, and the release notes that complete remains of small dinosaurs are very rare. The study is in Nature Communications in a paper titled “Fruit-eating adaptations in a Late Cretaceous oviraptorosaur (Theropoda),” with Funston as lead author. The paper’s authors include researchers from the Royal Ontario Museum and the North Dakota Geological Survey.
The question of what such an animal did in its ecosystem is what makes the find matter beyond the skull. Flowering plants became the dominant land vegetation during the Cretaceous, replacing cone-bearing plants, and paleontologists have long struggled to link dinosaur diversity with that change. A small animal that mashed fleshy fruit and discarded the seeds is one candidate for a missing link, though only a candidate.
The release also suggests dinosaurs may have played a role in spreading flowering-plant seeds, as birds, reptiles and small mammals do today. That is a hypothesis, and the paper itself says the group’s role in the Late Cretaceous spread of fruit remains unclear.
Evolutionary analyses cited by Sci.News suggest caenagnathids arose about 100 million years ago or more, soon after fleshy fruits appeared, and that the most specialized members emerged as fruits became larger and more varied.
The release says the findings may bear on whether dinosaurs were declining before their extinction, a debate it describes as ongoing. What no one can yet say is whether Infernogallus ate fruit as a specialist or only when it was in season, a question a single partial skeleton may not settle.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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