Scientists name first known fruit-eating dinosaur

A new species of small dinosaur, Infernogallus jamesi, has been described by researchers from Stony Brook University, the Royal Ontario Museum and the North Dakota Geological Survey. The fossils, found in the Hell Creek Formation in the United States, come from a dinosaur that lived in the Cretaceous period, some 145 to 66 million years ago. Infernogallus was about the size of a turkey and probably weighed about 12 kg (25 lb), making it one of the smallest members of its group, the caenagnathids. Its nearly complete skull and partial skeleton are now on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. It is the first known dinosaur that specialized in eating fruit.

Fruit‑eating adaptations

CT scans of the skull showed that the palatal bones arch downward into the mouth. That turns certain chewing muscles to face front to back instead of up and down. The setup would have allowed a back-and-forth chewing motion, similar to that of humans and some fruit-eating parrots. Forward-facing muscles like these are rare in the animal kingdom. The researchers concluded that the adaptations likely evolved to process soft foods such as stone fruit, removing the flesh from the main seed.

Greg Funston, who led the research, said: "We knew dinosaurs evolved to fill so many different roles in ecosystems in the Cretaceous, but we never expected to discover fruit-eating dinosaurs." Thomas Dudgeon, a co-author, added: "The anatomy of Infernogallus is bizarre among dinosaurs, and we quickly realized that we were dealing with something special." David Evans, chief curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and senior author of the paper, said: "This discovery shows that we still have a lot to learn about the world of T. rex, and about dinosaurs more generally."

The find suggests dinosaurs may have had an unrecognized role in the evolution of flowering plants, acting as seed dispersers, a job birds, reptiles and small mammals do today. During the Cretaceous, flowering plants replaced cone-bearing plants as the major vegetation on land, and fossilized fruits appear in the fossil record. Paleontologists had struggled to show clear links between dinosaur diversity and the evolution of flowering plants.

Implications for plant evolution

The nearly complete specimen, catalogued as ROMVP 65050, includes a skull and partial skeleton and is on display in the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs. The fossils were found in the Hell Creek Formation, where the animal would have lived alongside T. rex and Triceratops. The discovery was published in Nature Communications, DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-78343-w.