Ju-grass-ic Park

I, Science 22 November 2005
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NOVEMBER: Years of bad publicity have finally reached an end for dinosaurs. Fossilised dung has revealed the surprising fact that some dinosaurs actually ate grass, not people on toilets as many have now come to believe.

The team, led by Caroline Strömberg, a palaeobotanist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, collected 65 million-yearold droppings from the Deccan Traps of central India. The aim was to investigate the diet of titanosaurs, a group that includes Diplodocus.

Subsequent investigation found microscopic silica structures, characteristic of grass remnants. Grass was previously not thought to have existed until some ten million years after the dinosaurs, but it now appears that they did indeed coexist.

"It was very unexpected," says Strömberg. "We will have to rewrite our understanding of [grass] evolution … we may have to add grass to the dioramas of dinosaurs we see in museums."

Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, London, added: "It's not good dinner party conversation to say you work on fossilized dinosaur turds, but they are the best way to find out what dinosaurs ate."

Opinion is divided as to whether the Spielberg movies would have been more or less exciting had the dinosaurs refused fresh meat in favour of some tasty turf.