First Fruit-Eating Dinosaur Named Hell Chicken
Palaeontologists have named Infernogallus jamesi, a small turkey-sized dinosaur, as the first known dinosaur specialised for eating fruit, based on chewing muscles like those of parrots.
Among the carnivores and lumbering herbivores that roamed the Cretaceous landscape, another kind of dinosaur was evolving to eat something else: the plants that had begun to flower and produce fruit. The fruit-eating dinosaur Infernogallus jamesi, announced on 28 October 2026, is a small oviraptorosaur whose chewing muscles were arranged for mashing soft food, making it the first known dinosaur that specifically ate fruit. The discovery was made by palaeontologists from Stony Brook University, the Royal Ontario Museum and the North Dakota Geological Survey, and the work was published in Nature Communications. The team analysed the chewing muscles of the new species and found a unique arrangement seen today only in fruit-eating parrots.
Infernogallus, meaning hell chicken, was named because its fossils, including a nearly complete articulated skull and partial skeleton, were found in the Hell Creek Formation in the United States, stretching across Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. The animal lived alongside Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops in the final chapter of the dinosaur era. Belonging to a group of toothless, feathered dinosaurs called caenagnathids, Infernogallus was about the size of a turkey, roughly 1.5 metres long, and weighed about 12 kilograms. Its small size and soft-food diet set it apart from many of its famous neighbours.
How the fruit-eating dinosaur Infernogallus chewed
The muscle arrangement allowed the dinosaur to process fruit with special jaw movements, a feeding style that had not been recognised in dinosaurs before. The discovery suggests that dinosaurs may have had an unrecognised impact on the evolution of flowering plants as seed dispersers, carrying seeds to new places in the same way that fruit-eating animals do today. That ecological role still requires further research, but it opens a new way of thinking about how dinosaurs and flowering plants shaped each other. The fossil is now on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, where visitors can see the skull that revealed its surprising diet.
Source: Royal Ontario Museum
