Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Anatomically Strange Dinosaur Vacuumed Up Food

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the things-that-suck dept.

TaeKwonDood writes "A paleontologist has discovered a 110 million-year-old dinosaur that had a mouth that worked like a vacuum cleaner, hundreds of tiny teeth and nearly translucent skull." The creature's vertebrae also consisted of more air than bone, and CT scans of the head suggest it continually held its head low for food vacuuming. Low-hanging fruit, indeed.

1 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Complete Scientific Article by Selanit · · Score: 5, Informative

    Thanks to the Public Library of Science, their complete publication is available to us under the enthralling title Structural Extremes in a Late Cretaceous Dinosaur. I found Figure 1 especially interesting for its 3D visualizations of the skull structure. The thing's mouth really does resemble the shape of a vacuum cleaner, particularly one of those older models where the brush is on the end of a tube and all the machinery is in a little tug-along chassis. I'm inclined to think that it probably bit off the plants it was eating rather than "sucking" them up, though.

    Still, neat stuff, and yet more proof that there are a whole bunch of Really Weird Things(TM) out there.