The 'hell chicken' that ate fruit: a new dinosaur species mashed soft food like a parrot

Among the meat-eaters stomping around T. rex's world, one small dinosaur was doing something nobody expected: eating fruit. Paleontologists from Stony Brook University, the Royal Ontario Museum and the North Dakota Geological Survey have described a new species, Infernogallus jamesi — nicknamed the 'hell chicken' after the Hell Creek rocks in the USA where its nearly complete skull was found. About the size of a turkey, it had chewing muscles arranged like those of fruit-eating parrots today, built for mashing soft food back and forth rather than biting straight down. The study, published in Nature Communications, suggests dinosaurs like this one may quietly have helped spread the seeds of the flowering plants that were taking over the world.