Parasites wormed way into dino’s gut
Tiny tunnels crisscross fossilized stomach contents of 77-million-year-old hadrosaur
By Meghan Rosen
Inside the blackened guts of a 77-million-year-old dinosaur, scientists have spotted a surprise: the once slimy traces of parasitic worms.
Needlelike burrows snaking through the stomach of a duck-billed dino offer the first hard evidence that gut parasites infected dinosaurs, paleontologist Justin Tweet and colleagues report online June 16 in the Journal of Paleontology.
“Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re not,” says paleontologist Anthony Fiorillo of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas. “But they’re seeing something no one else has seen before, and that’s pretty awesome.”