‘Like swallowing a dinner plate’: 180 million-year-old fish may have choked to death on its supersized supper

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a fossilized fish that died after eating a huge ammonite

The tuna-like Pachycormus macropterus acquired an ammonite lodged inside its physique simply earlier than it died, researchers discovered.  (Picture credit score: Samuel Cooper)

A dinosaur-era fish seems to have died after getting eyes too massive for its abdomen and ingesting an enormous shell, researchers have discovered. The fish could have then choked to demise on it, or the shell tore its abdomen because it swallowed, the workforce mentioned. 

Scientists in Germany discovered the fish with the shell of an ammonite — an extinct group of marine mollusks — caught inside it. That is the primary time a fossilized fish has been found with an intact, giant ammonite inside its physique, Samuel Cooper, a doctoral candidate on the State Museum of Pure Historical past Stuttgart in Germany, instructed Stay Science.