Establishing the causes of death of an animal is not always easy – imagine how much more complicated it is when the animal has been dead for millions of years. Yet even fossils can hide clues that reveal what happened to a specimen shortly before it died.
However, it happens that these clues only generate confusion: this happened to paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor of the Chicago Field Museum, who found herself faced with the remains of a fossil bird that died in mysterious circumstances. And for once it’s not an exaggeration: 800 pebbles were found in the bird’s throat, and we don’t really know why, or whether they had anything to do with its demise. The study describing the curious specimen was published on Electronic Palaeontology.
800 stones? The fossil bird was kept in a Chinese museum, the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in Pingyi: this is where O’Connor discovered it, and he immediately understood that he was faced with a new species waiting to be described.
The specimen belongs to the family Longipterygidaewhich includes ancestors of modern birds that lived in China between 125 and 120 million years ago. O’Connor decided to baptize him Chromeornis funkyiin honor of the Canadian band Chromeo, one of his favourites.
Difficult digestion. Compared to others Longipterygidae that we know, Chromeornis it was smaller (it was as big as a sparrow), with many interesting anatomical features but above all a mystery to be revealed. In fact, a large quantity of pebbles, around 800, were found in the throat of the fossil specimen, which are presumably the cause of its death.
It is not uncommon for birds to swallow stones (called gastroliths) to facilitate digestion; it is rarer for them to suffocate each other, not to mention the fact that no member of the Longipterygidae has ever been found with gastroliths in his throat.
The mash. There is obviously the possibility that Chromeornis was the only species in its family to swallow stones to digest, but a more in-depth analysis of the nature of the 800 stones stuck in the animal’s throat revealed beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were not gastroliths.
Indeed, some of these stones were not stones, but balls of clay. In short, a “mash” ended up somehow in the bird’s throat, killing it.
A rock and roll mystery. The most likely explanation for the mystery, according to O’Connor, is linked to some pathology: when a bird is sick, it can happen to do strange things, and ingesting a handful of random material is a fairly widespread behavior even among modern birds.
O’Connor’s hypothesis is that, after swallowing 800 stones, the poor Chromeornis he tried to vomit them, but failed, and suffocated to death. An undignified death, but very rock and roll in its own way.
