Dinosaurs chewed grass?

The dinosaur fossils of dinosaurs in India showed giant titanosaur dinosaurs who ate grass.

Few scientists believe that dinosaurs chew on grass, because there is no evidence that the grass has existed since that time. They believe that grinding teeth in some dinosaur fossils are used to chew other plants, such as trees and beaver varieties today.

So when Caroline Stromberg at the Swedish Museum of Natural History received a photo of fossil dinosaurs from Vandana Prasad of the Institute of Botany in Lucknow, India, she could hardly think of finding pieces of grass in there.

" I was surprised to find the grass and was even more surprised to find that they were very diverse ," Stromberg said.

Prasad's team analyzed 65 million-year-old fossils of a giant plant-eating dinosaur. They found plants like cycads, pine trees and some other plants that grew in the Cretaceous period.

They sent some pictures and specimens to Stromberg and she recognized the small bad dioxyde silicon structures called phytolith. " It can't be argued, it's the mark of grass, " said Dolores Piperno, a botanist at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, USA. " Not only that, they come from different grass species. This is the first clear evidence that grass originates from the late Cretaceous and has been very diverse ."

Stromberg said grass phytolith is the same as in some rice plants today. The results also show that some ancient mammal species also chewed grass.

MT ( according to Reuters )