Researchers have carried out what might be the biggest research ever of dinosaur poop. The findings shed new mild on how dinosaur’s diets allowed them to dominate the planet. (This story first aired on Morning Version on November 28, 2024.)
ERIC DEGGANS, HOST:
Researchers have carried out the biggest research ever on – all proper, brace your self – dinosaur poo. Yeah, no, it sounds just a little messy. However as NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel stories, the findings might shed new mild on how their diets allowed them to dominate the planet.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: The top of the dinosaurs is well-known. A large asteroid got here down and wiped them out. However how did they get their begin?
MARTIN QVARNSTROM: We all know loads in regards to the life and extinction of the dinosaurs however not a lot in regards to the rise of the dinosaurs.
BRUMFIEL: Martin Qvarnstrom is a paleontologist at Uppsala College in Sweden. He is not simply any form of paleontologist, although. He spent his PhD finding out fossilized dinosaur droppings.
QVARNSTROM: 5 years of my life that I’ll by no means get again – no (laughter).
BRUMFIEL: These petrified poos go by the scientific title coprolites. They’re truly fairly widespread. And the extra Qvarnstrom has checked out them, the extra he is realized they might maintain the important thing to understanding how dinosaurs got here to rule the Earth. It began a number of years in the past when he and his colleagues had been analyzing a small variety of poos, and he began noticing little traces of what the dinosaurs had eaten.
QVARNSTROM: Because it turned out, all the specimens that we checked out contained undigested meals residues.
BRUMFIEL: A fish scale right here, an insect there – every dropping was a tiny window into what was on the menu. And with sufficient poop, it is perhaps potential to reconstruct all the meals internet from the Triassic when dinosaurs rose to energy. He and his colleagues assembled a set of samples from the Polish Basin in central Europe. They gathered all of the fossilized poop they might.
QVARNSTROM: As a result of it isn’t solely droppings from dinosaurs – it is also the opposite animals that had been residing in the identical ecosystem.
BRUMFIEL: So how a lot poop did you have a look at for this research?
QVARNSTROM: In complete, I feel we checked out over 500 specimens. That is a variety of poop.
BRUMFIEL: And the outcomes had been revealed within the journal Nature. They confirmed that whereas different lizards on the time had been centered on one kind of plant or different meals supply, dinosaurs had been consuming a lot of stuff.
QVARNSTROM: The primary dinosaur ancestors – they had been opportunistic. They had been consuming bugs, fish, crops.
BRUMFIEL: And that mattered as a result of in the course of the late Triassic, an enormous supercontinent referred to as Pangaea was breaking up. Oceans had been forming. The local weather was shifting.
QVARNSTROM: Dinosaurs had been actually fast to adapt to the brand new situations, whereas the earlier extra specialised animals had a harder time.
BRUMFIEL: No less than that is the story instructed by these fossilized droppings. Lawrence Tanner is a professor of environmental science at Le Moyne School in Syracuse, New York. He says curiosity in fossilized coprolites goes means again.
LAWRENCE TANNER: Folks have collected and labeled coprolites for many years, truly, like, even tons of of years, virtually, however nobody has studied them on this element earlier than.
BRUMFIEL: He applauds the brand new work, nevertheless it solely appears to be like at poo from central Europe.
TANNER: What we want now could be to attempt to see if we will see the identical kinds of transitions between these animal teams in different areas.
BRUMFIEL: In different phrases, scientists want extra fossilized poop. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR Information.
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