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Rare toothless dinosaur is an oddity among its carnivorous cousins
What the animal ate is still a mystery being debated by experts.
Today, a piece of land in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná is called the Pterosaurs’ Cemetery because of the hundreds of fossilized pterosaur bones found in the ancient basin. So when paleontologists working there unearthed a new fossil creature with a horny, parrot-like beak, they at first assumed it was yet another flying reptile.
Instead, researchers were shocked to learn that they’d found a whole new species of toothless dinosaur. Even stranger, the animal belongs to a group called the ceratosaurians—almost all of which were carnivores.
“The fact that we now have this toothless dinosaur means we have to rethink the evolutionary loss of teeth for all dinosaurs in this group,” says Alexander Kellner, a paleontologist on the team