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

Huh?! o_0

[DigiShaman]

We've found fossilized plants and animals on this planet. Yet, blades of grass numbering in the trillions throughout history are just NOW being found in our fossil record? Am I missing something? Is grass that really hard to fossilize in comparison to other plants on Earth?

I'm shaking my head now thinking "WTF"!

Re:Huh?! o_0

[Bazzalisk]

It's also possible that grass at that time was only common in a very limmited area and didn't spread accross the globe until later.

Also bear this in mind - the fossil record is so incomplete that we have gaps in it millions of years in length during which we've found no fossils. In fact if we were all to die out tomorrow it's quite unlikely that any human fossils would survive in 65 million years time - that's how small an amount of time we've existed for on a geological scale.

Re:DUH!

[aussie_a]

And this is where Slashdotters get their scientific information from. And slashdotters frequently post on Wikipedia. And people wonder why wikipedia isn't a trustworthy source of information.

Re:You left them out :(

[tloh]

Wow! Who would've thought such information would be discernable when soft tissue like digestive organs are almost never fossilized?!?! I'm racking my brains and I can't think of a single modern reptile that can handle the same diet. Do we have anything to compare with to get some idea of what form the internal organs of herbivore dinosaurs might take? God! I've got to be missing something... What modern reptile eats grass?

Re:Idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

No, that's not why it's big news. It's big news because it pushes back the timeline on grass evolution -- the article states the scientists were looking at fossils from the late Cretaceous, about 65 million years old. Angiosperms are known in the fossil record back to around 130 million years.

Q.E.D. grasses are not "about as primitive flowering plants as you get."

Re:You left them out :(

[Reziac]

And how do they know that the grass doesn't come from the intestines of some critter that the dinosaur in question ate?

But there are modern herbivorous reptiles (iguanas, tortises, others that don't come to mind at 5am). And there's no rule that says reptiles can't come in herbivore, omnivore, and carnivore versions, just like birds, fish, and mammals do.

Oh, and beaver (rodent family) don't eat trees. They eat tree BARK, not the woody part. They cut down trees to get at the tender bark on the younger branches (and sometimes just girdle young trees, thus killing them). When beaver get overpopulated, they often effectively clearcut their home territory.

Re:This confirms decade long theories

[LnxAddct]

I believe this article is more of a "Here is more evidence to back that theory of grass grazing" type of thing. The duck billed dinosaurs (Ornithopods in general) are considered the cows of of the past... it has been known for sometime that they graze.
Regards,
Steve