First evidence that dinosaurs ate birds

The world was a dangerous place for the first birds. Palaeontologists have found a fossil bird preserved where the stomach of a dinosaur would have been – the first direct evidence that dinos preyed on their feathered relatives.

Palaeontologists have long suspected that birds made up part of the predatory dino diet, but proof has been lacking. No longer: Jingmai O'Connor and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing found the near-intact skeleton of a primitive bird nestling suspiciously inside a fossilised predator.

The bird belonged to an extinct group called Enantiornithes and was lying in the ribcage of an early Cretaceous winged theropod called Microraptor gui. They were part of the prehistoric ecosystem known as the Jehol biota, which existed in what is now China and has also yielded numerous spectacular feathered dinosaurs.

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