Quartz crystals in the stomach of fossil bird complicates the mystery of its diet

It's hard to know what prehistoric animals' lives were like—even answering seemingly simple questions, like what they ate, can be a challenge. Sometimes, paleontologists get lucky, and pristine fossils will preserve an animal's stomach contents or provide other clues. In a new study in Frontiers in Earth Science, researchers investigating the fossil of a bird that lived alongside the dinosaurs got more questions than answers when they found quartz crystals in the bird's stomach.