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Sea Monster Found with 289 Stones in Its Gut

Paleontologists working in southern Utah have unearthed a Dolichorhynchops plesiosaur—a gigantic Dinosaur Era marine reptile—with 289 stones in its gut. How did the stones get there? The plesiosaur swallowed them.

"At the moment, it seems as though the stones served some sort of digestive purpose, helping to grind up bits of shell or bony material within the gut," Rebecca Schmeisser told Discovery News. Schmeisser coauthored the Palaois paper with David Gillette and is a University of Nebraska paleontologist.

What's particularly surprising in this case is that the plesiosaur had a relatively short neck. Its neck was long by today's standards, giraffes excluded, but for a plesiosaur, Dolichorhynchops possessed a puny neck.

Check out the impressive neck, for example, on Thalassomedon haningtoni.

This is intriguing, because paleontologists had previously theorized that the stones might have served as ballast, or a means of balancing the animal's weight underwater. Now it could be that this poor Dolichorhynchops kept swallowing stones that were too light for this purpose, but that's very doubtful.

Modern birds, in addition to their already high fiber diet full of nuts, seeds and fruits, swallow grit. The grit takes the place of certain strong muscles and bones, such as those associated with the jaw, which help to pulverize and process food. Birds can then retain their relatively light and dainty anatomical design with the aid of grit.

Some dinosaurs also possessed gastroliths, perhaps for a similar reason. Dinosaurs, like hefty sauropods, weren't lightweights, but their heads and necks were, relative to the rest of their enormous bodies.