Todd Walton wrote:
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 7:11 PM, Ralph Shumaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Since grass is not supposed to have evolved until after the dinosaurs became
extinct, why is grass found in dinosaur dung?
Have you ever seen a full scale Therizinosaurus mockup? How could a
dinosaur get that high if it didn't have grass? QED.
Just because it didn't eat grass, doesn't mean there weren't other
chlorphyll based plants.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1118_051118_grass_dinos.html
"Cropping low vegetation, such as grass, may explain why some of these
titanosaurs have very wide mouths reminiscent of the wide mouth of the
grass-feeding hippo and white rhino," he said.
Mammals called gondwanatherians also lived during the late Cretaceous
and might have been more dependent on grasses for food.
The early mammals had high-crowned teeth, which puzzled paleontologists,
because it was thought that grasses were quite rare at this time.
Some researchers felt the teeth must have evolved for digging or gnawing
on wood.
"Our study shows that grasses existed in India simultaneously with the …
gondwanatherians," Strömberg said.
"These remarkable results will force reconsideration of many
long-standing assumptions about grass evolution, dinosaurian ecology,
and early plant-herbivore interactions," Piperno and Sues wrote in their
review.
-a
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