Even Dinosaurs Ate Rocks
Eating rocks is not a new evolutionary phenomenon. It has likely been happening for hundreds of millions of years. Scientists and paleontologists have routinely found rocks in what would be the stomach cavity of fossilized dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. The pattern is often the same. Small, often polished rocks, sometimes dierent than those customarily found in the surrounding geologic profile are found among dinosaur remains. Prehistoric gastroliths have been found in the fossil record in a similar range of animals as those today. The fossilized animals found were often plant-eaters and most often either animals with gizzards or those that lived in the water. Gastroliths have been found in actual dinosaurs, such as sauropods (think long-necked and long-tailed dinosaurs) and ceratopsians (think triceratops and the like), as well as other prehistoric creatures. These include plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and crocodilians. Much like the rethinking going on with modern stone-eating animals, the reasons for ancient animals eating rocks may soon have alternative explanations. Many plant-eating creatures found with gastroliths didn’t have enough of a quantity to suciently grind up food and many marine animals did not have enough rocks that would appreciably aect their buoyancy. It is now thought that the consumption of stones by some of these animals may have been less frequent than previously thought, or even accidental in the case of those animals that may have scooped up their prey from the seabed.