Newly Discovered Dinosaur Fossil Named After Chromeo

The only thing funkier than Chromeo‘s synth grooves is learning that a dinosaur fossil named after them died with 800 stones lodged in its throat.

The newly discovered species, a sparrow-sized bird creature named Chromeornis funkyi, was found at the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in China by Jingmai O’Connor. The renowned paleontologist is the associate curator of fossil reptiles at Chicago’s Field Museum and lead author of a new paper describing the species in the journal Palaeontologica Electronica.

O’Connor said Chromeo is one of her favorite bands, drawing parallels between their music and the timeless warbling of birdsongs. Celebrating the madcap milestone, the electro-funk duo called her “a lifelong Chromette.”

“We’ve been doing this for 20 years but this is the first time someone’s called us a dinosaur!” Chromeo said. “Jokes aside, this is an incredible honor to add to a career full of surprises. We’re glad to bring a little fossil funk to the great science of paleontology.”

The fossil belongs to the enantiornithines, a bird group that dominated the Cretaceous period before being wiped out by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. While many birds swallow stones called gastroliths to help grind food in their gizzards, CT scans revealed a peculiar case in the eyes of O’Connor, who said she immediately knew it was a new species.

“I noticed that it had this really weird mass of stones in its esophagus, right up against the neck bones,” she said. “This is really weird, because in all of the fossils that I know of, no one has ever found a mass of stones inside the throat of an animal.”

The sheer number of tiny stones in the specimen’s throat far exceeded what would be expected in birds with gizzards and some weren’t even proper rocks, appearing more like clay balls based on their density. O’Connor and her team of researchers believe the bird was sick, consuming the stones abnormally.

When it attempted to regurgitate the mass, the obstruction became fatal, according to Field Museum. “It’s pretty rare to be able to know what caused the death of a specific individual in the fossil record,” O’Connor noted. “But even though we don’t know why this bird ate all those stones, I’m fairly certain that regurgitation of that mass caused it to choke, and that’s what killed that little bird.”

Understanding why successful species like Chromeornis funkyi ultimately went extinct could inform modern conservation efforts, she added.

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