RE: dinosaurs did eat grass

[Jeff Hecht <jeff@jeffhecht.com>]

The phytoliths themselves are minerals in grass that are hard on dentition, 
although it's not clear if they were as abundant in the early grasses. They are 
present in reasonable quantities in the coprolite. There were late Cretaceous 
mammals, the gondwanatherians, which had evolved high-crowned teeth the could 
be explained by their habit of eating grasses. 

At 8:04 PM -0500 11/17/05, Ronald Orenstein wrote:
>>Obviously a big question is what were those grasses? All they have is the 
>>phytoliths, which are definitely grassy but don't narrow down to specific 
>>modern grass groups.
>
>More specifically, if these were early forest grasses, they may have lacked 
>the mineral deposits that make modern grasses is so hard on the dentition of 
>mammalian grazers.  I presumed that there is no evidence of anything 
>resembling hypsodont-type adaptations in dinosaurs?  Also, Cretaceous grasses 
>may not have evolved the ability to form the kind of large single-species 
>colonies we see in grasslands and in bamboo thickets.  In other words, there 
>does not seem to be any evidence that, if there really were grasses in the 
>Cretaceous, they posed a dietary challenge much different from that of any 
>other forest plant of the time.
>
-- 
Jeff Hecht, science & technology writer
jeff@jeffhecht.com
Boston Correspondent: New Scientist magazine
Contributing Editor: Laser Focus World
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