Mummified ankylosaur offers a rare glimpse of a dinosaur’s last meal
With the help of a mummified fossil, paleontologists got an incredibly rare look at a dinosaur’s last meal. (Illustration by Julius Csotonyi, Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology /)A mummified armored dinosaur found in present-day Canada is giving paleontologists a peak into the eating habits of herbivores that lived 110 million years ago. Fossilized plants preserved in the carcass’s belly reveal that it was dining on a fresh crop of ferns that sprung up after a fire. The soccer ball-sized mass was full of a select few varieties of ferns with traces of charcoal mixed in. Researchers surmise that the dinosaur was a choosy eater and that forest fires might have played an important role in its lifestyle.It’s incredibly rare for a dinosaur’s last meal to be so well preserved, says Caleb Brown, a paleontologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta who published the findings June 2 in the journal...