Something a bit fishy about hadrosaur’s diet
Plant eater left, uh, behind evidence of dining detour
Nearly everyone has cheated — accidentally or purposely — on their diet. But not everyone has been called out for it from stool samples.
Fossilized-feces analysis by an associate professor at the University of Colorado shows that a plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaur from 75 million years ago sometimes slipped into a seafood diet, probably during breeding and egg-laying seasons.
Karen Chin, curator of paleontology at the Boulder school’s Museum of Natural History, found the hadrosaur’s fossilized feces during a dig at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. She was with a team from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
“From what we know about dinosaurs, this was a totally unexpected behavior,” Chin said in a statement. “It was such a surprising discovery. We wondered what the motivation could have been.”
Hadrosaurs were some of the most common dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period. They grew up to 30 feet long and weighed up to 3 tons. Some species had crests on their heads. The dinosaurs had specialized teeth for grinding plants. Some paleontologists believe they roamed in herds and nurtured their young.
They ate rotting wood where the crustaceans were living. And although everyone accidentally slips up on a diet, Chin expects this to be a more deliberate attempt for protein and calcium.
The crustaceans — whose modern-day lineage includes lobsters, crab and shrimp — were at least 2 inches long, according to the statement. That makes them about 20 to 60 percent the width of a hadrosaur beak.
“While it is difficult to prove intent regarding feeding strategies, I suspect these dinosaurs targeted rotting wood because it was a great source of protein in the form of insects, crustaceans and other invertebrates,” Chin said. “If we take into account the size of the crustaceans and that they were probably wriggling when they were scooped up, the dinosaurs would have likely been aware of them and made a choice to ingest them.”
Additionally, crustacean shells turned up in at least 10 fossilized feces samples in three different stratigraphic layers over about 13 miles, according to the statement.
Utah was probably next to or near a sea during the Cretaceous Period. Chin could not determine what type of crustaceans were eaten but said fossil crab claws have been found in the same area in a slightly older geologic formation.
Chin — along with Kent State University co-authors Rodney Feldmann, a professor emeritus, and Jessica Tashman, a doctoral student — published the findings Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
There has been a lot of dinosaur news in Colorado lately. The Denver Museum of Nature & Science recently finished the excavation of a triceratops at a construction site in Thornton.