April the museum dinosaur still revealing new discoveries

Tenontosaurus skeleton - Recent research regarding a dinosaur nicknamed April which previously called Manchester Museum home has revealed rare new findings. Scientists made the discovery of gastroliths (stomach stones) inside the Tenontosaurus which is unusually rare. This represents the second oldest occurrence of gastroliths in an ornithopod dinosaur and the first to be identified in a more derived ornithopod. Only three unambiguous occurrences of gastroliths in an ornithopod dinosaur are known. Manchester's Tenontosaurus is also the largest ornithopod dinosaur known with stomach stones. The palaeontologists behind the discovery used X-ray CT scanning and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to assess so-called 'seeds' and 'ash' found with the specimen and revealed that they were not seeds after all and that the dinosaur did not die in a layer of ash, as had originally been suggested when it was found. However, the skeleton was found with two teeth of the predatory dinosaur, Deinonychus , a relative of the infamous Velociraptor .