Poor Chromeornis funkyi. What an embarrassing way to go. Those who have not brushed up on their Latin names for bird species that have been extinct for hundreds of millions of years, Chromeornis funkyi is a newly identified bird. The remains of one were just found, and its throat was filled with 800 rocks.

Researchers from Chicago’s Field Museum spotted the fossil at China’s Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature. Using a microscope, associate curator Dr. Jingmai O’Connor noticed that the bird had a mass of stones in its esophagus. That’s something he had never seen before in any throat of any animal fossilized remains he had observed in the past.

Now, there could have been a reasonable explanation for this. A gizzard stone is a rock swallowed by an animal to help it digest food that its teeth

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