Grass Grazing In Dinosaurs Confirmed

longhawn writes "Reuters AlertNet reports that a team of researchers found evidence in India that dinosaurs ate grass. This discovery was made when scientists found pieces of grass in fossilized dinosaur dung (coprolites). Prior to this finding, scientists did not even know that grass existed at that time." From the article: "Few scientists had ever thought that dinosaurs grazed, because there was no evidence that grasses existed that long ago. They believed that the grinding teeth found in some dinosaur fossils were used for munching other plant matter, perhaps trees, like modern beavers chew on today."

Comments

Idiot

[Commander Trollco]

This is big news because it sets back the timeline on angiosperms(flowering plants). Grasses are about as primitive a flowering plant as you get. Previously, the earliest forms in the fossil record are Plants similar to today's Magnoliaceae, from Cretaceous-era fossils. With Titanosaurs being Jurassic, I assume...
Life as we know it today is imtimately bound up with the flowering plants, and of would be radically different in a Gymnosperm-only world.

This confirms decade long theories

[G3ckoG33k]

I don't rememeber who came up with the original theory, but grass browsing in dinosaurs has been suspected for decades. For example the molar teeth in triceratops (and allies) and in the duck billed all are made for grass grinding, not those licking angiosperms which are much softer. Was it "wild and hairy ideas" Bakker who first proposed it?

Re:This confirms decade long theories

[flyingsquid]

Setting a few things straight here-

(1) First, this is NOT the first evidence for Cretaceous grass- there's been some evidence from pollen grains in India, South America, and Africa. See New Scientist for a better writeup. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8336.

(2) This grass (assuming it is grass and not one of its close relatives, which can also deposit silica in their tissues) is from India, not North America. The flora of North America is very well known(from both pollen and leaf fossils), and there's zero evidence for grass in North America until substantially later. So it's unlikely, to say the least, that the American duckbills and horned dinosaurs ate grass.

(3) A blade does not a grassland make. It may have existed, but it was hardly common in the way it is today. Grasslands didn't become widespread until millions of years after the dinosaurs became extinct, so it's extremely unlikely that any dinosaur was a specialized grazer, or even that grass made up a significant portion of the diet of dinosaurs.

Re:Slashdot Logic

[volfro]

From TFA:

They sent some photographs and then samples to Stromberg, who spotted tiny silica structures called phytoliths.

"It's indisputable that these are from grasses. The shape of these phytoliths indicate that they are from grasses," said Dolores Piperno...

They didn't find whole blades. They found remnants from several different types of grasses. Which suggests to these paleontologists (not Slashdot) that 1: the dinosaurs ate grass; and 2: that the grass had been around for a long enough time to adapt and diversify.

The scientists made the leap, not slashdot. RTFA.

Re:Slashdot Logic

[theguyfromsaturn]

As far as I know, this is quite a stunning discovery. Until recently, it was believed that grass only appeared a few million years ago. Not several tens of millions.

Re:Slashdot Logic --My Cat

[DarkOx]

My cat will sometimes eat grass as well but I think it would hardly be fair to say he is a grazing animal.

Re:Huh?! o_0

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth history does not consist of the succession: A) no plants, B) all modern plants.

The order of appearance in Earth history goes more like:

A) no land plants, B) spore plants, C) seed plants, D) flowering plants, E) grasses (which are a type of flowering plant)

It takes a few hundred million years for that succession to play out (e.g., the earliest land plants known are based on spores from the latest Ordovician Period, which is over 400 million years ago, flowering plants don't show up until the Early Cretaceous, around 140 million years ago).

So, grass is a relatively new evolutionary development. Even with this new discovery (from the Cretaceous Period), it still is. Grass in the Cenozoic Era, where it is best known, is indeed as abundant as fossils as you would expect it to be.

By contrast, if you were walking through a Jurassic Period forest, or a Carboniferous Period forest, you would see plenty of plants -- from trees to low ground cover -- but grass wouldn't be there, and the mix of plants would be fairly strange (e.g., in the Carboniferous, there would be tree-sized spore plants, the modern relatives of which are perhaps 10cm tall, and in the Jurassic you'd see plenty of cycads and ginkgoes). It is weird to think about a world without grass, yes, but it is no stranger than imagining what it would be like with dinosaurs roaming around. Plant history is just as strange in its own ways. Ferns with seeds instead of spores is pretty odd, as are giant lycopod trees 10 or 20 metres tall -- they were the "dinosaurs" of their era.

Look up the subject of "paleobotany" if you want more details.

Re:Digesting grass is hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Not sauropods, anyway. But some of these plant-eating dinosaurs did have a gizzard-like structure full of stones, presumably used to crush/grind the food in their stomachs (these sauropods did not have the right type of teeth for grinding food -- they just collected the food and swallowed)). Some of these "stomach stones" (called gastroliths) are as big as your fist, and the whole collection from one sauropod dinosaur would fill a good-sized bucket. So, imagine a king-sized, four-legged, plant-eating turkey with gravel in its gizzard instead of sand. Other than the fact that a gizzard-like structure was present, and that the system must have been big, the nature of the rest of the digestive system in sauropods is speculative. Although soft tissues do sometimes get preserved as fossils, that hasn't been the case for any sauropods.

Re:More support for the Bible

[Derek Pomery]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behemoth

The use of tail as euphemism for a penis makes sense.
I also like the elephant hypotheis.

Easier to believe than some bizaare theory about dinosaurs living up to present age.

Re:You left them out :(

[utnow]

The big point of the article isn't "wow they were herbivores". The point was that they were eating grass... along with other vegitation. If they're digestive tract (in this case, teeth) could handle the cellulose in other plant matter, then there's nothing too strange about them eating grass, aside from the part where we didn't know grass even existed durring this time period.... and that was from the summary! ;o)

Re:More support for the Bible

[Derek Pomery]

*sigh*
Two can play the link game.
Only mine aren't wild exaggerations of recent and perfectly valid science.
(i.e. - no it wasn't red blood cells found. someone lied to you. And I was reading attempted explanations of geology based on a global flood before the world wide web. the pseudoscience hasn't changed, which saves a lot of time on the repeated debunkings)

Let's see now...
http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/

Red blood cells. That'd be under paleontology (http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html#CC)

A stupid misreading of a recent discovery. Ah. Here we go.
http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC371.html

And I don't pretend to know or care which particular flood claims you find so attractive, but we'll just go with the entire Geology section with attempts to explain complicated geological processes like the Geological Column using simple Sedimentation mixing (read those sections).
http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html#CD

The fact is, is that the lies are much simpler to understand than the complicated processes of how this world works.
Shame, really. In my opinion, why shrink and belittle the world and its history?
Doesn't that shrink and belittle any Creator?