There’s a New Way to Study Dinosaurs: Fossilized Feces and Vomit

A new study has found that studying fossilized dinosaur feces helps us understand details about their diet and, therefore, ecosystems millions of years ago. The findings were revealing.

Bones say a lot about people. We can reconstruct their skeletons and discover what they looked like, how they lived and what type of diet they adopted.

But for this last aspect, researchers have discovered a way to analyze it in more detail. No, published in the magazine Naturethis Wednesday, several types of bromalite: coprolites (fossilized feces), regurgitalites (fossilized vomit) and cololiths (fossilized feces that were still in the dinosaur’s intestine when it died), to find out more about its diet.

“We can never be sure about the diet and eating behaviors of extinct animals if we don’t look at bromalites,” explained the paleontologist Martin Qvarnströmfrom Uppsala University, Sweden.

“Of course we can guess, but bromalite analysis gives us direct evidence of what the animals ate. We found many surprises along the way that we would never have guessed from the fossil bone record alone,” he added.

The researchers examined more than 500 of these fossils from the Polish Pangea Basin regionfrom the end of the Triassic to the beginning of the Jurassic, between around 230 million and 200 million years ago, says .

“Our results confirm that the appearance of dinosaurs was complex and unfolded gradually over 30 million years”, said the researcher.

“We were incredibly surprised by many of the discoveries! We found tiny insect remains in many coprolites and, in a coprolite, small beetles were found intactwith the small legs and antennae still preserved”, said the researcher.

“In one place we found coprolites full of pieces of crushed bones and teeth. Apparently, the primitive archosaur Dragonperhaps the first large theropod in the region, used its powerful bite to crush bonesjust like a modern hyena.”

However, unlike the hyena, the hyena’s teeth Dragon they were not very robust, but rather blade-like, which caused them to break repeatedly and end up in the coprolites“.

It was also through analysis of surviving feces and vomit that paleontologists discovered that many carnivorous dinosaurs ate other land animals, rather than fish or insects, as previously thought.

Furthermore, the bromalites of herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs contained, in a large part of the samples analyzed, remains of burned plants. The researchers believe that this fact may have contributed to a more adventurous diet, as charcoal can absorb toxinsthus neutralizing the potentially dangerous ferns that herbivores also ingested.

These discoveries in the Polish basin may not be extrapolated to the entire land face, but still, “all the fantastic inclusions of coprolites and unusual diets were very interesting to discover,” says Qvarnström.

“The most fascinating thing for me was the fact that we were able to use seemingly uninteresting and perhaps repulsive fossils and merge multiple data sources and gain an unprecedented view of the ecology and dietary adaptations of the first dinosaurs”, says the paleontologist.

“Now we have a good model to test and compare with other areas of the world. We are extremely interested in doing so and this time we are also aware of the time and effort it requires. But we are ready for it!”, he concludes.