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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."
like modern beavers chew on today.
:(
Nobody cares about the outdated beavers
They'll find out that us hairless monkeys smoked grass!
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
Tastes best in brownies.
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
Of course they had grass. Just look at the Land Before time XXXXXXXVVVVV. http://www.animationusa.com/picts/univpict/family. jpg (notice the pretty grass?)
Science: Scientists find piece of grass in dinosaur dung.
Slashdot: Grass Grazing Dinosaurs CONFIRMED!
I'm glad that slashdot is prepared to make the leap from pieces of grass found in a pile of dung to active grazing by that animal.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
Nov 19, 2005 HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam police have arrested British rocker Gary Glitter on a child molestation charge, a state-run newspaper reported on Sunday.
The Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper quoted immigration police at
Ho Chi Minh City's Tan Son Nhat airport as saying Glitter whose real name is Paul Francis Gadd was arrested while trying to board a plane to Bangkok on Saturday morning.
Aguilera Reportedly Marries Music Exec
Snoop Dogg Rallies for Crips Co-Founder
Laughing for the Earth
Immigration police at the airport declined to comment.
The state-run youth newspaper said police escorted Glitter back to the southern resort town of Vung Tau where, according to state-run Vietnamese media, he had taken home several girls aged 15 or under.
On Thursday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung said police wanted to question the 61-year-old rocker about the allegations, which first surfaced in the British tabloid press.
"If we have evidence of a child sexual violation, very strict legal measures would be applied," Dung said.
On Friday police launched a formal investigation against Glitter.
The age of consent in Vietnam is 16 and sex with minors is punishable by up to 12 years in jail.
Glitter was sentenced to four months in jail in Britain in 1999 after being found guilty of storing more than 4,000 images of child pornography on the hard drive of his computer.
After his release, he left Britain for Cuba and then later turned up in Phnom Penh.
Child rights activists hounded him out of Cambodia twice and have had his name put on an entry blacklist, although Glitter filed lawsuits last year fighting the deportation orders.
Vietnamese newspapers have reported Glitter had been in Vietnam for about a year.
... dinosaurs will also have drank water from lakes!
Is this actually some kind of valuable discovery? Don't pretty much all species eat grass in one form or another?
Personally, if there were a lot of trees in the past, I think that there would have been more than a lot of grass. And if there were leaf chomping dinos, there were grass chomping dinos too. Besides...Were stegosaurs intelligently capable enough to actually attempt to reach anything positioned higher than 1m above ground level?
I thought everything in india ate dirt ;)
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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.
http://persianews.on.nimp.org/?u=Tar_Baby
so, does this mean there were dinosaurs?
or is this how god planned?
or perhaps, is this the devil planting stuff so we lose faith in god?
crap, ima pray to the flying sphaghetti monster for guidance.
ramen.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
This discovery was made when scientists found pieces of grass in fossilized dinosaur dung (coprolites)
Man, and I thought I had it tought digging through million year old crap (code) at work. I never imagined that would literally be someone's job >_>
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I can just see Bollywood doing its own version of Jurassic park now.
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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"!
Life is not for the lazy.
the Amazing Grass Eating Dinosaur theory!
We found one blade of grass. This blade of grass has sucessfully thrown out all the theories we previously had about dinosaurs. But don't criticize our new theories. If you do, you are an evil, anti-science Republican idiot. Worship our doctrine! Worship us!
Bow down before the scientists, your pagan gods! Dance monkies! Dance! Dance and never use critical reason skills!
There were no WMDs! Humans cause global warming! Dinosaurs ate grass all the time! Alger Hiss wasn't a soviet spy! Cell phones cause cancer! Cindy Shehan doesn't raise money for terrorists! The Land Bridge theory isn't full of holes!
Worship us! Worship us! Worship us! Worship us or be exterminated!
Oooh!
;)
Even the dinosaurs in India are vegetarian!
(well, as an Indian who happens to be vegetarian, I reserve the right to make such obviously ridiculous jokes)
Hey don't carnivores like cats eat grass too to help with digestion
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On Thursday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung
Duh! Of course grass existed back then. It was only 6000 years ago. And dinosaurs and plants were only created two days apart. C'mon people!
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?
I understand that the point is that grass was not known to exist during this time, but I'm saying could the dinos just be eating grass eaters?
Of course there was grass. What else would they have had on their lawns back then? Stupid.
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
Clearly, the parent is some sort of subtle joke, because I refuse to believe that anyone could be this stupid. Such is my faith in humanity and its innate decency and propensity for logical thinking.
When they need to - yechch...!
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
Dinosaurs 'chewed' grass. Entire dinosaur population killed while driving 5mph to the nearest corner store to buy munchies.
Task Mangler
is it not? Cows have like, 4 stomachs (or something... i didn't do good in biology)
Do they even know how many stomachs dinos had?
I have to take a giant coprolite!
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Wow, what an idiot.
WTF? Where is Event Horizon?!!
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
... if one found a pube stuck in his teeth, we can call it evidence that humans grazed on hair?
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
From reading TFA, I think this only tells us something about grass, less about dinosaurs. The grass that was found in dung indicates the grass existed and was eaten in the period the dinosaur lived.
BUT... does that mean all of the species ate grass? Couldn't this be just the one, or perhaps a few individuals that, say, accidentally ate some grass for some reason, like "mad-dino's-disease"?
Maybe that titosaurus just got done eating a beaver which had ate the grass?
My cat will sometimes eat grass as well but I think it would hardly be fair to say he is a grazing animal.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Pure Vegitarian!
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
Millions of years from now they'll be researching Redneckus Fundamentalus Americanus. They'll discover that they died out because literally, they were born with shit for brains.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
"Behold, Behemoth,
which I made as I made you;
he eats grass like an ox.
Behold, his strength in his loins,
and his power in the muscles of his belly.
He makes his tail stiff like a cedar;
the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
His bones are tubes of bronze,
his limbs like bars of iron.
Some have translated "Behemoth" to be a hippopotamus. Give me a break... go look at a picture of a hippo. They're fat tubs of lard with puny tails. The description here is much closer to a dinosaur (who eats grass). Chapter 41 goes on to talk about the Leviathan, a great dinosaur-like sea creature. Before you say I'm crazy for claiming that dinosaurs and humans once lived together, your question might be answered here or here.
The weird thing is that the dinosaur in question found to eat grass was the T-Rex, deeply confusing both sides in the "vicious hunter or cowardly scavenger" argument.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Maybe they were like dogs, and they just chewed on grass when they were sick.. Or is that cats? I can't remember now
Actually, three dinosaurs are mentioned in the Bible.
Tanniyn -usually translated serpent or dragon
Behemoth - description similar to a Brontosaurus (Job 40)
Levyathan - large sea serpent (Job 41)
Excuse me, I think you meant to say our Intelligent Designer made it look like there were dinosaurs who ate grass. Sheesh. Didn't any of you attend science class?
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
How is it that they can find fossilized dung from the era, but not fossilized grass? Why would grass be exempt from fossilization when a lot of other stuff apparently isn't? Just wondering.
Ge 1:30 - "And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground -- everything that has the breath of life in it -- I give every green plant for food." And it was so.
Just a little stab at those who claim (foolishly) that dinosaurs only ate each other.
They only killed each other when one stole the other's Cheetos.
Wow. Really important "breakthrough".
I can't believe the "science" fan bois on here make fun of the fundie dorks. You're all about as equally useful.
First Dinosaur: -Yo, man, look at this great grass, let's eat it.
Second Dinosaur: -Oh, yeah, last time I had that stuff I felt weird, man, my paws became huge and for the whole day after that I was just sitting there, thinking about the meaning of existance. It was brilliant!
F.D.: -Dude, that's some GOOD shit.
COP Dinosaur: -Station, this is patrol 69, I've got a couple of junkie-sauruses here, send backup.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, but did they do algebra?
(note: substitute the "leftie"s and "rightie"s with the appropriate sides of whatever duality seems to fit your tastes best)
I interpret it as: a political leftie pretending to be a political rightie trolling political lefties by sounding like a really stupid political leftie berating political righties.
Or: A rightie doing a shitty job of pretending to be an evil leftie.
Or something like that. Either way, not original, barely amusing, and all in all, I expect more from Slashdot's trolls than "worship us you stupid republicans!!!"
-1, Mediocre (yeah, I do wish)
That's nothing.
There's evidence of grass consumption by various species of dinosaurs in north america. I'm not sure they eat it, though.
GPG 0x1B479C78
So they found grass in a dinosaurs stomach. Is this evidence that they lived solely on grass? or even that they used grass as a food source? I think for the timebeing they just found grass in a fossilised dinosaurs stomach..
dinosaurs ate cows. But of course, since it's India, that evidence was suppressed.
Obviously the grass didn't adapt well enough if it was inside the belly of the Dinosaur!
Now grass that defends itself! There's an adaptation!
Cannabis and Hops ?
Good gracious !
The dinousaurs were getting stoned and then soused on beer !
No wonder they were sluggish, large, and eventually died out.
Except for those few who only chewed on it for medicinal purposes, of course.
Further evidence that, just as darwin said just before he died, evolution is false. I like the cleverly worded article though, as to be careful not to bash on the integrity of the theory.
http://www.geocities.com/sea_saur/images.html
The real point, as missed in this message, is that grass existed at the time of the dinos--as was not believed before.
Certainly not in the sense that most people think of reptiles (snakes, lizards, etc). To say dinosaurs are (or rather, were) reptiles, you might as well also say that birds are reptiles and even that mammals are reptiles (descended, as they are, from mammal-like reptiles like cynognathus or dimetrodon, and indeed monotreme mammals still lay eggs).
Indeed "dinosaur" itself is a rather vague catchall term, meaning anything from "any Jurrasic to Cretaceous animal not obviously a fish, bird or mammal" to its more technically correct meaning "a member of the order Ornithischia or Saurischia, and certainly excluding pterosaurs or pleisiosaurs".
Alas, we're pretty much stuck with the imprecise terminology that was first popularized. Consider how surprising the article would be if the title were "Grass Grazing in Therapods Confirmed", vs the more accurate (given TFA's contents) "Grass Grazing in Sauropods Confirmed".
If they'd found grass in Tyrannosaur droppings, I'd be amazed! (As it is, evidence of late Cretaceous grass is still surprising, conventional wisdom is that grasses arose in the Tertiary.)
-- Alastair
There's also a write-up on this available online at 'Nature' http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051114/full/051114 -13.html
It raises informative points which the interested amateur may do well to note.
To address point's raised in the discussion:
Although grasses are dominant in habitats across the world today, they weren't thought to exist until some ten million years after the age of dinosaurs had ended.
A significant change in the "first appearence" horizon of the grasses. Despite the parody that creationists present, real-world geologists (and palynologists in particular) are much more precise in the language they use. "Date of first appearence in the fossil record" is a concept that rapidly gets abbreviated in the popular press to "date of origin", but the two concepts are very distinct. Unfortunately, this gives unscrupulous people an opportunity to claim there is more dispute in the science of harth history than there actually is. There are disputes, but within the profession they're nowhere near as significant as the unscrupulous protray them to be.
The team collected 65-million-year-old droppings from the volcanic Deccan Traps of central India in order to study the diet of titanosaurs, the group of super-size dinosaurs that includes Diplodocus.
The discovery of the coprolites between lava/ tuff deposits of the Deccan traps illuminates the "was it the asteroid at Chixulub or was it the Deccan eruptions" debate. There have long been people who used evidence like this to argue that the Chixulub impactor was not the only factor. Also, since the Deccan volcanicity was going on before the Chixulub impactor, the "Chixulub caused Deccan" arguement has never had appreciable support in the profession. (Note - Diplodocus was extinct long before this, though it's descendents or relatives were still around.)
Now it seems that dinosaurs or other early mammals may have been the early grazers that gave grass a head start. Dinosaurs probably contributed minimally to this, Stromberg says: they mainly had the wrong kind of teeth for ripping up grass, and the titanosaur coprolites indicate that grass was only a small part of their diet.
RTFA is as over-used and under heard phrase as RTFM used to be.
(Note 2 - I should update my signature line to include the "FGS".)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
What's special about grasses is that grass grow from the bottom, while most if not all other plants have the grow-point at the tip. This means that grass will survive and trive with gracing. If you grace on any other plant you'll eat off the grow point. Grasses evolved because of extreme gracing pressure. The first plant that had its growing point at the root instead of at the tip got a tremendous advantage and the new species would spread around like, er, grass.
What's special about grasses is that grass grow from the bottom, while most if not all other plants have the grow-point at the tip. This means that grass will survive and trive with gracing. If you grace on any other plant you'll eat off the grow point. Grasses evolved because of extreme gracing pressure. The first plant that had its growing point at the root instead of at the tip got a tremendous advantage and the new species would spread around like, er, grass.
Mod parent up! This is exactly right, but you beat me to it. It makes perfect sense for grass to evolve under grazing pressure, and I don't see how large herds of grazers could exist for more than a very short while if it weren't for a resilient, bottom-growing plant like grass.
You're missing the boat with both me (as a potential convert) and the fundamentalist point of view represented by dogged literalism with respect to Genesis.
The core teachings of Christ, or at least those that haven't been perverted by the doctrinal machinations of two millenia of Pharisees, appeal to me. I could not possibly care less for the assertion that, because the Bible has to be the word of God with no allowances for the superficiality of mortal understanding, rabbits chew their cud and people were created as literal dust into which God breathed. That's a beautifully poetic image, the breath of God, but its literal truth doesn't do thing one for me and my attempts to lead a moral life.
Meanwhile the fundamentalist world thinks those things are far more crucial than Christ's teachings about what it means to be a child of God. The reason is simple: they claim to know God absolutely, and to have certain moral authority as a result. To keep their worldly authority, they need to buttress their claim to the Bible's literal truth. They claim God's righteous power, and don't want anyone to question their claim. So they defend frankly idiotic positions through tortuous intellectual constructions, as an act of irrational self-defense.
Fundamentalism is about authority, not about morality. It has jack squat to do with Jesus's teachings; if anything fundamentalists seem to me to worship him as an idol, or as an authority figure who has the power to grant them everlasting life in exchange for worship. They see their own petty authoritarian dreams projected onto Jesus, rather than caring a whit for what the guy stood for... Which coincidentally wasn't anything like what fundamentalism claims in his name.
Jesus would probably scorn his most ardent admirers in today's world. They worship him rather than taking his message into their hearts, and spend their souls on foolish attempts to hold onto their own worldly power. Again -- Pharisees, who think they cross the right ritual Ts and worship the right people, and therefore merit salvation.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I don't see how large herds of grazers could exist for more than a very short while if it weren't for a resilient, bottom-growing plant like grass.
I'm surprised that an intelligent design didn't attack this part of the thread yet.
I'm surprised that an intelligent design didn't attack this part of the thread yet.
If they did, I would just refer them to this link: Is God an Accident? and direct them to pay special attention to section V, which is entitled "We've Evolved to be Creationists".
Now that would really cause ballistics.