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November 7, 2026

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Science & Health

Meet the ‘hell chicken’: the first dinosaur known to eat fruit

Faizan Altaf

A small, toothless dinosaur that lived beside Tyrannosaurus rex turns out to have been a fruit eater. Scientists have named it Infernogallus jamesi, or “hell chicken”, and say it is the first dinosaur known to have specialised in eating fruit.

The animal was about the size of a turkey, roughly 1.5 metres (5 feet) long and weighing about 11 to 12 kilograms (around 25 pounds). It lived roughly 66 to 68 million years ago, near the end of the age of dinosaurs, in what is now the western United States. Its fossils come from the Hell Creek Formation, across Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming, which has also produced T. rex and Triceratops.

The research was published online in Nature Communications on 10 October 2026. The Royal Ontario Museum and Stony Brook University announced the discovery on 28 October, and Reuters reported it on 30 October. The fossil, a nearly complete skull with part of a skeleton, is now on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Until now, scientists had no clear proof that any dinosaur specialised in fruit. Infernogallus is the first with a skull built for the job: its jaw muscles were arranged so its beak could slide back and forth, mashing soft food, in a way seen today only in fruit-eating parrots.

At a glance

What happened: Scientists have identified Infernogallus jamesi, a small feathered dinosaur from the Hell Creek Formation, as the first known dinosaur specialised in eating fruit, based on the chewing muscles and jaw joints in its fossil skull.

Why it matters: It shows dinosaurs filled a wider range of roles in their ecosystems than anyone expected, and it links dinosaurs to the rise of flowering plants and fruit in the Cretaceous period.

What happens next: The fossil is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, and researchers say more work is needed to test whether fruit-eating dinosaurs helped spread seeds, as fruit-eating birds do today.

A turkey-sized dinosaur with a parrot’s way of eating

Infernogallus belonged to a group called the caenagnathids, toothless feathered dinosaurs with beaks, long legs and light, air-filled bones. They were part of the oviraptorosaurs, a wider family of bird-like dinosaurs. Infernogallus was one of the smallest members of its group even as a fully grown adult.

Its name joins the Latin words for hell and chicken. The “hell” part refers to the Hell Creek Formation, where the fossils were found. The “chicken” part refers to its bird-like build and turkey-like size. The animal walked on two legs, had a toothless beak, and was probably covered in feathers, though none were preserved on these fossils.

It lived in a warm, subtropical coastal floodplain, sharing its world with Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops and Ankylosaurus. Into this crowded world came a small dinosaur that ate something nobody else seemed to want: soft, fleshy fruit.

“We knew dinosaurs evolved to fill so many different roles in ecosystems in the Cretaceous, but we never expected to discover fruit-eating dinosaurs,” said Dr. Gregory Funston, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor at Stony Brook University in New York. “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.”

Caenagnathids have puzzled scientists for more than a century because their skulls were almost unknown. Their light, hollow skeletons rarely survived burial in one piece, so most of what scientists had was isolated jaws and limb bones. The Infernogallus skull changes that: it is nearly complete, still joined together as it was in life, and the first skull of its kind found in this condition.

How the skull gave the diet away

The team worked out the diet from the shape of the skull, not from stomach contents: no fruit was found inside the fossil. Instead, the researchers used CT scans to rebuild the skull in three dimensions and work out how its chewing muscles were arranged and how its jaws moved.

Three features pointed to fruit, according to Funston. First, the chewing muscles were organised to power a back-and-forth chewing motion, rather than the simple up-and-down bite of most dinosaurs. Second, a mobile joint let the lower jaw slide forward and backward by up to about 15 millimetres. Third, the upper and lower jaws carried ridges and grooves that fitted together as the jaw moved, helping to mash soft food.

The key sits in the roof of the mouth. In Infernogallus, the palatal bones arched downward into the mouth itself, turning some chewing muscles around so they pulled front to back instead of up and down. The result was a chewing motion in which the beak slid back and forth, much like the way a human chews, instead of the rigid vertical bite of T. rex and other dinosaurs.

The bite itself was weak: the jaw muscles pulled mostly front to back, which is good for grinding but poor for crushing hard food. The animal also had no stomach stones in its body cavity, although many plant-eating dinosaurs swallowed stones to grind tough food. The missing stones, together with the weak bite, point to a diet of soft food that needed a lot of processing in the mouth, rather than tough, fibrous plants.

The researchers think the animal was built to mash stone fruits, known as drupes, to strip the flesh from the hard seed inside. Drupes are fruits with a central pit, and today they include peaches, cherries, mangoes and olives.

The parrot clue

The strongest clue came from a living bird. The muscle arrangement in Infernogallus matches the arrangement found today only in fruit-eating parrots, above all the vulturine parrot, also known as Pesquet’s parrot (Psittrichas fulgidus), which eats fruit by mashing the pulp and throwing away the seeds.

Such forward-facing chewing muscles are rare in the animal kingdom. They appear in mammals such as humans and in a small number of birds that specialise in fruit. The researchers concluded that the same arrangement in Infernogallus probably evolved for the same reason: to process soft food in the mouth instead of in the gut.

“It’s pretty rare for animals to become specialized for a diet of fruit, so when it happens, it comes with some remarkable adaptations,” said Dr. Thomas Dudgeon, a co-author of the study and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Royal Ontario Museum. “The anatomy of Infernogallus is bizarre among dinosaurs, and we quickly realized that we were dealing with something special.”

From meat-eaters to fruit-eaters

One of the biggest surprises is where Infernogallus sits on the dinosaur family tree. Caenagnathids evolved from the meat-eating side of the tree. They belong to the theropods, the group that includes T. rex and all the meat-eating dinosaurs, as well as the entire bird lineage. Some theropods later took to eating plants, and Infernogallus took that shift further than any other dinosaur known.

The timing lines up with the history of fruit itself. The team’s analysis suggests caenagnathids arose roughly 100 million years ago or more, soon after fleshy fruits first appeared, and the most specialised members emerged later, around the time fruits grew larger and more varied. In the words of the paper, the herbivorous diet of caenagnathids “likely consisted in large part of fleshy angiosperm fruits, which increased in size and diversity in concert with the radiation of oviraptorosaurs”.

Angiosperms are flowering plants, and fruits are their reproductive structures. During the Cretaceous period, which ran from about 145 million to 66 million years ago, flowering plants took over from cone-bearing plants as the main vegetation on land. Until now, scientists had struggled to show any clear link between dinosaur diversity and the rise of flowering plants. Infernogallus provides the first solid link: as fruits became bigger and more common, at least one line of dinosaurs evolved the tools to eat them.

Why fruit matters: flowers, forests and seed-spreading

The discovery also raises a bigger question. Today, fruit-eating birds, reptiles and small mammals carry seeds away from the parent plant and drop them in new places, helping forests spread. If dinosaurs did the same job in the Cretaceous, they may have helped shape the spread of flowering plants across the planet.

The researchers are careful here. They say the discovery suggests dinosaurs may have helped flowering plants spread as seed dispersers, but the evidence is not yet strong enough to prove it. The paper states that the role of caenagnathids in the spread of fruit in the Late Cretaceous “remains unclear”. It is possible that Infernogallus swallowed seeds whole and passed them unharmed, or that it crushed them, as the vulturine parrot does today.

How scientists found and studied it

The main fossil, known by its museum number ROMVP 65050, was collected in 2011 from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. It is a nearly complete, articulated skull with part of the skeleton, which is rare for a small dinosaur, whose small, light bones usually break and scatter. Extra jaw and palate bones from Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota were also assigned to the same species.

The animal’s age was worked out from growth rings in thin sections of its bones, like the rings of a tree. They showed the animal was at least six years old and fully grown, even though it weighed only about 12 kilograms.

The skull was studied with CT scans, which build a three-dimensional picture of the inside of the fossil without cutting it open. The scans let the team rebuild the jaw muscles and joints and test how the beak would have moved.

The fossil is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The museum and Stony Brook University led the announcement, together with the North Dakota Geological Survey. The senior author is Dr. David Evans, the museum’s chief curator of natural history.

“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,” Evans said. “This discovery shows that we still have a lot to learn about the world of T. rex, and about dinosaurs more generally.”

What it does not prove

A careful reader should keep the limits in mind. First, the diet is an inference from anatomy, not a direct observation: no fruit, seeds or stomach contents were found with the fossil. The case rests on the jaw muscles, the sliding joint and the ridges on the beak, and on the match with fruit-eating parrots. That is strong evidence, but it is still a reconstruction of behaviour from bones.

Second, the claim covers one species and its close relatives. The paper suggests other caenagnathids may have eaten fruit in a similar way, but that is a proposal based on shared anatomy, not a proven fact for every member of the group. Third, the seed-dispersal idea is unproven: the paper states that this role “remains unclear”, and the fossil does not show whether seeds survived being eaten.

Finally, the numbers carry some uncertainty: sources give the weight as about 11 to 12 kilograms and the age as roughly 66 to 68 million years ago, and different reports round those figures differently. The size is best read as approximate. None of this weakens the central finding: the skull is real, the muscle arrangement is unusual, and no other dinosaur shows this combination of features.

Frequently asked questions

What does Infernogallus jamesi mean?

The name means “hell chicken”: “inferno” is Latin for hell and “gallus” is Latin for chicken. The “hell” part refers to the Hell Creek Formation, where the fossils were found in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. The “chicken” part refers to the animal’s bird-like build and turkey-like size.

How big was the “hell chicken”?

It was about the size of a turkey: roughly 1.5 metres (5 feet) from beak to tail and about 11 to 12 kilograms (around 25 pounds). Bone growth rings showed the main fossil came from an animal at least six years old and fully grown, so it was a small adult, not a youngster of a bigger species.

How do scientists know it ate fruit?

They worked it out from the skull. CT scans showed that the bones in the roof of its mouth arched downward, turning some chewing muscles to pull front to back instead of up and down. Its lower jaw could slide forward and backward by up to about 15 millimetres, and its jaws had ridges and grooves that fitted together for mashing. The same muscle arrangement is found today only in fruit-eating parrots, and the weak bite and absence of stomach stones point to soft food that needed mashing in the mouth.

Did it live alongside T. rex?

Yes. Infernogallus lived roughly 66 to 68 million years ago in the Hell Creek Formation, alongside Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops and Ankylosaurus, in a warm, subtropical coastal floodplain.

Could dinosaurs spread seeds like birds do today?

Possibly, but it is not proven. Modern fruit-eating birds, reptiles and small mammals carry seeds to new places and help forests spread. The researchers say dinosaurs may have played a similar role, but their paper states that this role “remains unclear”, because it depends on whether seeds survived being eaten.

Where can I see the fossil?

The main fossil, specimen ROMVP 65050, is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, in the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs.

Conclusion

Infernogallus jamesi is a small dinosaur with a big lesson. For more than a century, scientists knew almost nothing about the skulls of its group, the caenagnathids. Now a single well-preserved skull has shown that one of them was a fruit specialist, with a sliding jaw, grinding ridges and chewing muscles arranged like those of a fruit-eating parrot. It lived beside T. rex and Triceratops, but it made its living in a quieter way: mashing soft fruit in a world where flowering plants were taking over.

The discovery widens the picture of what dinosaurs could do: they were not only hunters and grazers. At least one of them was a fruit eater, and its evolution tracked the rise of fruit itself. Whether these animals also helped spread seeds is an open question. For now, the “hell chicken” stands as the first known fruit-eating dinosaur, and as a reminder that the age of dinosaurs still holds surprises.

This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.

Sources

Faizan Altaf

Faizan Altaf is the founder and author of findivoza.com, a news blog covering world, Pakistan, business, technology, health and sport in plain English. He writes for general readers who want clear, trustworthy news without jargon. His work focuses on explaining what happened, why it matters, and what to watch next.

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