LiveScience.com - A newly described dinosaur hopefully suffered no nut allergies. Fossil remains suggest the parrot-beaked beast that lived 110 million years ago was a sophisticated nutcracker, researchers said this week.
Scientists have discovered a unique beaked, plant-eating dinosaur in China. The finding, they say, demonstrates that theropod, or bird-footed, dinosaurs were more ecologically diverse in the Jurassic period than previously thought, and offers important evidence about how the three-fingered hand of birds evolved from the hand of dinosaurs.
Plants or meat: that’s about all that fossils ever tell paleontologists about a dinosaur’s diet. But the skull characteristics of a new species of parrot-beaked dinosaur and its associated gizzard stones indicate that the animal fed on nuts and/or seeds. These characteristics present the first solid evidence of nut-eating in any dinosaur.




