Some dinosaurs ate grass

This 2016 video from the USA says about itself:

Measuring 122 feet, the Museum’s new exhibit, The Titanosaur, is big–so big that its head extends outside of the Museum’s fourth-floor gallery where it is now on permanent display.

This species of dinosaur, a giant herbivore that belongs to a group known as titanosaurs, is so new that it has not yet been formally named by the paleontologists who discovered it. The Titanosaur lived in the forests of today’s Patagonia about 100 to 95 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, and weighed 70 tons.

It is one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered. The fossils on which this cast is based were excavated in the Patagonian desert region of Argentina by a team from the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio led by José Luis Carballido and Diego Pol, who received his Ph.D. at the American Museum of Natural History.

In this video, Dr. Mark Norell, chair and Macaulay Curator in the Division of Paleontology, describes how such a massive animal could have supported its own weight and why the Titanosaur is one of the more spectacular finds during what he describes as “the golden age of paleontology”.

From the BBC:

Thursday, 17 November 2005

Dinosaurs got munchies for grass

A study of fossil dinosaur dung has for the first time confirmed that the ancient reptiles ate grass.

Grass was previously thought to have become common only after the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.

But grasses were probably not a very important part of dinosaur diets – the fossilised faeces show the big beasts ate many different types of plants.

However, the Science journal study suggests grass was possibly an important food for early mammals.

Caroline Strömberg from the Swedish Museum of Natural History and her colleagues studied phytoliths (mineral particles produced by grass and other plants) preserved in fossil dinosaur dung from central India.

Theory dumped

The 65-67 million-year-old dung fossils, or coprolites, are thought to have been made by so-called titanosaur sauropods; large, vegetarian dinosaurs.

See also here.

Giant titanosaur in Argentina: here.

Titanosaurs in Australia: here.

Titanosaurs were extremely widespread during the Cretaceous period, to the extent that just about every country on earth can lay claim to its own genus. Thailand’s entry in the titanosaur sweepstakes is Phuwiangosaurus, which in certain respects (long neck, light armor plating) was a typical member of the breed, but in others (narrow teeth, strangely shaped vertebrae) stood apart from the pack: here.

Around 30 to 40 million years ago, grasses on Earth underwent an epic evolutionary upheaval. An assemblage capitalized on falling levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide by engineering an internal mechanism to concentrate the dwindling CO2 supply that, like a fuel-injection system in a car, could more efficiently convert sunlight and nutrients into energy: here.