Infernogallus jamesi combined a sliding jaw with a ridged beak, researchers say, providing anatomical evidence for a dinosaur adapted to fruit and other soft plants.
Researchers have described a new dinosaur species, Infernogallus jamesi, whose toothless beak and unusual jaws suggest a specialised diet of fruit. The study, published in Nature Communications, draws that conclusion from fossil anatomy and reconstructed chewing movements.
Study co-author Thomas Dudgeon, a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, said fruit eating had previously been proposed for some dinosaurs without supporting evidence, and that the discovery suggests dinosaur diets were more varied than previously thought.
Infernogallus lived about 66 million years ago, during the Cretaceous, on a subtropical coastal floodplain. It was about 1.5 metres long and weighed around 11.3 kilograms. Its fossils were found in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana and North Dakota.
Reuters describes the fossils as a nearly complete skeleton and isolated jaw and palate bones. Stony Brook University’s account, published on 28 October 2026, describes a nearly complete skull with its bones still joined and a partial skeleton.
The dinosaur belonged to the caenagnathids, a group within the theropods. That broader branch includes meat-eating dinosaurs, some plant eaters and birds.
Lead author Greg Funston, a palaeontologist at Stony Brook University, identified three key adaptations:
Stony Brook University said the team used computed tomography (CT) scans to reconstruct the skull. The palate bones, which form the roof of the mouth, arched downwards into it. Those preserved bones provided the basis for reconstructing some muscles as running front-to-back rather than vertically, supporting the proposed sliding chewing motion.
Funston said the three adaptations occur separately in living animals that eat soft foods, including fig-eating vulturine parrots and green sea turtles that chew seagrass. No living animal combines all three. These comparisons support the interpretation of soft-food processing; because they include seagrass eaters, they do not point to fruit alone or establish an exclusively fruit diet.
Flowering plants first appeared around 130 to 140 million years ago, well before Infernogallus, and later spread across landscapes previously dominated by plants such as conifers. Possible foods for the dinosaur included berries and drupes—fruits such as peaches and cherries with a central stone.
Funston proposes that caenagnathids could have helped spread large seeds: Cretaceous mammals and birds were probably too small to carry very large seeds or move them long distances, while large-seeded fruits were becoming more widespread. More evidence is needed, however, before confidently linking caenagnathids to that seed-dispersal role.
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