Re: dinosaurs did eat grass

[Phil Bigelow <bigelowp@juno.com>]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 23:32:55 -0700 Andrew RC Milner
<andrew@hanmansfossils.com> writes:
> Jim Kirkland and I just looked over this interesting article tonight 
> and we 
> are curious if anyone has seen Late Cretaceous grass pollen?

A good question.
Furthermore, modern pollen from Sahara Desert flora are routinely
collected in pollen traps* throughout the U.S., meaning that pollen can
not only hop between continents, but it can also hop across oceans.

Modern grass pollen has many diagnostic features.  Cretaceous grass
pollen should have at *least* a few of those characters as well.

So either palynologists have been misidentifying Cretaceous grass pollen
as another taxon for the last 70 years (that level of consistent
misidentification would be a feat in itself), or there actually was no
grass pollen in the Cretaceous.  If the latter is true, then the
phytolith attributed to a Cretaceous grass may actually have come from a
closely related (sister group) non-grass taxon, or possibly from the
ancestor of grasses (although not a grass, itself).

* Pollen traps:  Sticky paper, similar to fly paper,  used by
agricultural scientists to collect airborne pollen.

<pb>
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