A newly described fossil bird that lived around 120 million years ago has given researchers a rare insight into its cause of death: choking on a mass of rocks lodged in its throat. The discovery, led by Jingmai O’Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago, was published in the journal Palaeontologica Electronica.

O’Connor found the small fossil, about the size of a sparrow, during a visit to the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in China. “There are thousands of bird fossils at the Shandong Tianyu Museum, but on my last trip to visit their collections, this one really jumped out at me,” O’Connor said. “I immediately knew it was a new species.”

The fossil shares features with Longipteryx, a larger prehistoric bird, particularly large teeth at the end of its

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