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

You left them out :(

[DrEldarion]

like modern beavers chew on today.

Nobody cares about the outdated beavers :(

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:You left them out :(

[TapeCutter]

"God! I've got to be missing something... What modern reptile eats grass?"

Yes, you are missing something. Dinosaurs were not reptiles, many belive their closest living relatives are birds. Also they didn't get the "ate grass" evidence from digestive organs, it was found in fossilised dino turds. Why not read TFA next time?

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:You left them out :(

[dalutong]

You are right about the birds. But him talking about the digestive organs makes perfect sense (with his incorrect premise.) Some species can not eat grass because their digestive tract can not handle it. Just as some can't handle meat. If we had found meat in some herbivore's dung people could legitimately ask, "what do we not know about this herbivore? did they find any part of its digestive tract to indicate that it was different somehow?"

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:You left them out :(

[jeschust]

And how do they know that the grass doesn't come from the intestines of some critter that the dinosaur in question ate? Coming from a rudimentary understanding of paelontolgy, if a dinosaur with sharp, cutting teeth is found with grass in the stomach area, it would probably be assumed to have eaten a herbivore. TFA mentions that the droppings are of such a large size that they are assumed to be from a large sauropod, a type known to have the "gnashing, chewing" type of teeth exclusively.

And in a few million years...

[Xanlexian]

They'll find out that us hairless monkeys smoked grass!

I eat grass too!!

[Prophetic_Truth]

Tastes best in brownies.

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.

Re:Idiot

[10am-bedtime]

angiosperms brought us long-distance SEX -- all hail angiosperms!

Wow...

[RootsLINUX]

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 >_>

Re:Slashdot Logic

[ozmanjusri]

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.

So what you're saying is that the grass might have climbed onto the poo pile and settled itself in there?

Not a bad survival strategy, when you think about it.

Dino pinches out a log, turns around for a ritual sneaky peek and sniff. Furrows brow, "Hmmm, I don't remember eating that". Shrugs shoulders, ambles off in search of less clever prey.

Smart, that grass.

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

[sleppy1]

It's hard to get grass to jump into a tar pit.

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: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.

Veggie Dinos

[metlin]

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)

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: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

Indirect Evidence?

[core plexus]

My dog sometimes eats ground squirrels, mice, Moose, and other grass eaters. Sometimes, she even eats grass. My point is her stools contain grass, more often from the guts of the animals she eats.

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?

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

[aussie_a]

Yeah, it probably just ate something that was eating grass.

Scoff if you will, but this isn't that far-fetched. It wasconfirmed that grass existed when the dinosaurs were around. But it could have been a mammal (they existed when the dino's did) that ate the grass. However it was found in a titanosaur's (a herbivore) shit. They didn't go around munching on mammals.

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:From the makers of Global Warming Theory comes.

[pnewhook]

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.

Re:More support for the Bible

[TheLink]

Well I'm a christian, and I think that christians should focus on spreading a more important message, than spend too much time on rather debateable points, especially things that don't actually form the foundation of the Christian faith (e.g. Jesus).

If you believe in the behemoth being a dinosaur in the long term it gains you very little even if it is true. Whereas the whole point of Christianity is that believing in Jesus gains you a lot.

In all the hot air from the intelligent design, creationist, evolution parties, was there much really to do with Christianity? Did it help spread the Good News? Was it a blessing to other people?

Instead of wasting so much time in debates like whether we are descended from apes or not, maybe we should ponder whether we really are behaving like God's children or not.

Now if the debate was on whether Jesus died and was resurrected or not, that would be an important doctrinal and core issue, and one worth defending.

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: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?

Re:Slashdot Logic

[kfg]

If you read more carefully written popular articles about this finding than the one linked to, written by authors who specialize in science reporting, you'll find that they say it is "suggestive" that the dinosaur at grass. The only thing that is really accepted as proven at this point is that grass existed at that time.

The OP's scoff is misplaced when aimed at "those whacky scientists." It should be aimed at the those whacky idiot reporters who report that the whaky scientists found "pieces of grass" when they did no such thing.

However, the distribution of the grass phytoliths in the copralite and the fact that they came from multiple species of grass is highly suggestive of consumption.

KFG

Adapt?

[the_skywise]

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!

Mod this down as Dis-informative

[Withershins]

The real point, as missed in this message, is that grass existed at the time of the dinos--as was not believed before.