Fossils reveal that pterosaurs puked pellets

Picture it: Two hungry pterosaurs, one adult and one juvenile, settle down to dig in to a delicious lunch of fish. Down their gullets the whole fish go. A little later, back up come the scales and other indigestible fishy bits, vomited neatly as millimeter-sized pellets.

Scientists now have the first fossilized evidence that pterosaur dining included a final course of regurgitation, scientifically called antiperistalsis. While studying two specimens of Kunpengopterus sinensis, a pterosaur species that lived in what is now China between 199 million and 146 million years ago, researchers found a gastric pellet containing fossilized fish scales preserved alongside each individual, they report February 7 in Philosophical

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