Chinese paleontologists studied the amazing stomach remains of a birdlike creature that existed well over 100 million years ago. A deadly birdlike dinosaur was thrown into a lake over 100 million years ago and turned into an unusual relic in what is currently China, conserving one of the few entire stomach fragments known from template dinosaurs, according to new research.
When paleontologists discovered "a huge bluish layer in the abdomen'' of the fossilized creature, they knew they had discovered something special. The perfectly preserved beast originally belonged to the previously undiscovered species Daurlong wangi, along with a dinosaur lineage known as the dromaeosaurids, which involves the ancestors of modern birds.
The research team said in the study, which was published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports dated Nov. 19, that this blue layer showed "excellent retention" of the dinosaur's intestines. The discovery sheds light on the evolution of avian and dinosaur guts, providing researchers with a better understanding of what people ate throughout the Lower Cretaceous period (145 million to 100.5 million years ago).
Possible Fossilization Explanation
Dromaeosaurids (commonly known as "raptors"), such as D. wangi the majority of were tiny, feathery, and carnivorous. First from the mid-Jurassic period (approximately 167 million years ago) through the late Cretaceous period, this group inhabited the Earth (66 million years ago). Among their number were some of the most well-known pop-culture dinosaurs, including Velociraptor and Deinonychus. Despite their ubiquity, however, nothing is understood about their stomachs.
Soft tissue retention is exceptional in any fossil, but intestine preservation is very rare in dinosaurs. In an interview with Live Science, Andrea Cau, an autonomous paleontologist located in Parma, Italy, is the first example among dromaeosaurids. To prevent decay-causing germs from eating away at delicate soft tissues like cartilage and organs, fossilization conditions must be precisely perfect. The recently defined D. wangi specimen was most likely buried swiftly there at the bottom of a body of waters in what is now known as the Jehol Biota - a location noted for very well fossils in contemporary Inner Mongolia, a fully independent territory in northern China.
The dinosaur's remnants calcified into fossils in the low-oxygen atmosphere where aerobic microorganisms could not live. The researchers called the dinosaur's genus 'Daurlong,' well after the Daur people of Inner Mongolia, and the species 'wangi,' for Wang Junyou, the head of the Inner Mongolian Museum of Natural History.
'Exceptional Preservation'
The extraordinary preservation sheds light on how D. Wangi's existence and what it may have eaten according to paleontologists, its digestive system appears to be identical to the relatively few other fragments documented from meat-eating dinosaurs, implying that the more omnivorous dromaeosaurid intestines designs did not emerge until after the Cretaceous epoch, after the arrival of modern birds. D. also appears to be present. Wangi fed on small food such as animals (no bigger than beavers during the Mesozoic era), fish, other small dinosaurs, and possibly amphibians.
Despite the D. Wangi's intestines were preserved, but not its stomach. The researchers believed that the very acidic environment of the abdomen soon after the animal's death may have stopped it from pretreating and converting into a fossil.
Unlike the dinosaurs shown in the 1993 film "Jurassic Park," many dromaeosaurids were tiny and light. D. The wangi itself was approximately the size of a pony, measuring just under five feet (1.5 meters) from tip to tail. It also had feathers, like the rest of its family.
Cau and his colleagues intend to investigate the creature more thoroughly in the future to learn about its feathers, existence, and potential death. Their objective is to learn more about plumage coloration in life as well as to better reconstruct the unusual circumstances that lead to soft tissue preservation, as Cau concluded.
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