Toronto, ON/Stony Brook, NY: October 27, 2026 – Among the ravenous carnivores and lumbering herbivores that roamed the Cretaceous landscape, another kind of dinosaur was evolving that started to eat something else: the plants that began to flower and produce fruit.
The discovery by paleontologists from Stony Brook University, Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), and the North Dakota Geological Survey reveals a new species, Infernogallus jamesi – a type of small oviraptorosaur – had chewing muscles for mashing soft food, making it the first known dinosaur that specifically ate fruit.
Led by Dr. Gregory Funston, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University, the research – which analyzed the chewing muscles of the new species, showing that it had a unique arrangement only seen in fruit-eating parrots today – was published in the journal Nature Communications .
"We knew dinosaurs evolved to fill so many different roles in ecosystems in the Cretaceous, but we never expected to discover fruit-eating dinosaurs," says Dr. Gregory Funston. "For more than 100 years, we didn't know what the skulls of these animals looked like. Now, we know they were even weirder than we could have predicted."
Infernogallus, meaning "hell chicken," was so named because the fossils – including a nearly complete, articulated skull and partial skeleton, currently on display at the Royal Ontario Museum – were found in the Hell Creek Formation in the U.S. (stretching across Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming), where it would have lived alongside T. rex and Triceratops.
Belonging to a group of toothless, feathered dinosaurs called caenagnathids, Infernogallus was a small dinosaur the size of a turkey, and would have weighed about 12 kg (25 lbs) – making it one of the smallest members of its group even as a fully grown adult.
Curiously, Infernogallus and its relatives evolved from the meat-eating side of the dinosaur tree. Detailed analysis of its chewing mechanics shows that its skull was specialized for mashing stone fruits to remove the flesh from the main seed. This came as a surprise, because paleontologists had previously struggled to show any clear links between dinosaur diversity and the evolution of flowering plants. However, this discovery underscores parallels between the evolutionary radiations of caenagnathids and fruit, with caenagnathids evolving their specialized chewing capabilities as fruits became bigger and more common.
"It's pretty rare for animals to become specialized for a diet of fruit, so when it happens, it comes with some remarkable adaptations," says Dr. Thomas Dudgeon, current Rebanks Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ROM and one of the co-authors of the research paper. "The anatomy of Infernogallus is bizarre among dinosaurs, and we quickly realized that we were dealing with something special."
Infernogallus's ability to chew fruit can be seen in the adaptations to its palatal bones – the parts of the skull that make up the roof of the mouth. Using CT scans to reconstruct the skull, the researchers found that these bones arched downwards into the mouth itself, which made certain muscles face front-to-back instead of up and down. This would have enabled a chewing motion where the beak slid back and forth, like in a human, instead of the rigid vertical bite of T. rex and other dinosaurs.
These forward-facing muscles are rare in the animal kingdom – though are present in mammals like humans who demonstrate complex chewing, and in some birds that specialize in fruit-eating, like the Vulturine Parrot (Psittrichas). The uniqueness of this muscle organization led the researchers to conclude that these adaptations likely evolved for the same reason: processing soft foods – such as fruit – in the mouth instead of the gut.
The revelation that Infernogallus was a fruit-eating dinosaur is additionally significant, as the discovery suggests that dinosaurs may have had an unrecognized impact on the evolution of flowering plants as seed-dispersers – an important role filled by birds, reptiles, and small mammals today. During the Cretaceous period, flowering plants took over from cone-bearing plants as the major vegetation on land – as seen in the fossil record, which includes fossilized fruits.
"Complete remains of small dinosaurs like Infernogallus are very rare in the fossil record. The strange skull of Infernogallus is an exciting find because it reveals surprising insights into dinosaur evolution and feeding specialization," says Dr. David Evans, Chief Curator, Natural History & Temerty Chair in Vertebrate Palaeontology at ROM and senior author of the paper. "This discovery shows that we still have a lot to learn about the world of T. rex, and about dinosaurs more generally."
Recognizing that this species may have played a new ecological role during this period also indicates that we might not yet appreciate the full diversity of dinosaur species and behaviours at the end of the Cretaceous era – adding to the scientific debate about whether dinosaurs were in decline before their extinction.
