Splendid. It’s thunderous. Their mighty footsteps and loud cries once echoed all over our planet. And dinosaurs’ 165 million-year rise to dominance is now revealed in the fossilized poop and vomit they left behind. Yes, that’s true. By collecting hundreds of fossils of digested and undigested dinosaur food, a category collectively called bromalites, paleontologists were able to take a closer look at the rise of the dinosaurs with a level of detail we’ve never seen before.

In this unusual trove of digestive treasures, paleontologist Martin Kvarnström of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues were able to reconstruct the food webs of dinosaurs in the Polish Basin 200 million years ago. They say the results provide a new tool for understanding how dinosaurs lived and survived in a world very different from ours today.

“Our results confirm that the rise of dinosaurs was complex and occurred gradually over 30 million years,” Kvarnström told ScienceAlert.

“To a certain degree, opportunism (early relatives of dinosaurs and early herbivores had a very generalist diet) and competition played a role. Dinosaurs were better adapted and less vulnerable to the effects of climate change than many of their contemporaries.”

Bones tell us a lot about dinosaurs. We can reconstruct their skeletons and learn what they looked like, how they lived, and what their diet was like. But bones can’t tell us much. We don’t know the details of these diets, how they might have supplemented their staple foods, or how they might have competed for resources.

Kvarnström and his team realized that bromalites might be an untapped resource in this regard. He and his colleague Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki conducted a small pilot study a few years ago and discovered an absolute cornucopia of well-preserved food remains. Since then, his interest has only deepened.

“We can never be sure of the diet and feeding behavior of extinct animals unless we look at bromalites,” he explained. “Of course, we can only guess, but analysis of bromalites gives us direct evidence of what animals ate. Along the way, we encountered many surprises that we would never have predicted based on fossil bones alone.”

The new research involved examining different types of bromalites: coprolites (fossilized feces), regurgitaliths (fossilized vomit masses), and cololiths (fossilized feces still in the dinosaur’s gut when it died). These samples were subjected to a series of analyzes including visual inspection, synchrotron microtomography and scanning electron microscopy.

Researchers examined more than 500 of these fossils from the Polish Basin of the Pangea region from the Late Triassic to the Early Jurassic, about 230 million to 200 million years ago. When you consider how many times dinosaurs pooped over the course of 30 million years, 500 doesn’t seem like a lot, but nevertheless the study provided a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the ecosystems of that period.

“We were incredibly surprised by many of the findings! We found tiny insect remains in many coprolites, and in one coprolite tiny insects were found intact, with their tiny legs and antennae preserved.” said Kvarnström.

“In one place we found coprolites filled with bone fragments and crushed teeth. Apparently an early archosaur Smoke Possibly the first large theropod in the region, it used its powerful bite to grind bones, like the modern hyena. However, unlike the hyena, the teeth Smoke “They were not very strong, but resembled knives, which caused them to break repeatedly and fall into the coprolites.”

They also found that many carnivorous dinosaurs ate other land animals, not fish or insects as previously thought. And the bromalites of herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs often contained the remains of burnt plants.

Researchers believe this may have contributed to a more adventurous diet, as charcoal can absorb toxins and thus neutralize potentially dangerous ferns, which herbivores also ingest. And this would help dinosaurs evolve.

“The way these herbivores sampled all the plants of the new flora, unlike the more specialized non-dinosaur herbivores, must have been an incredible advantage under changing environmental conditions,” Kvarnström told ScienceAlert.

This strategy does not need to be mirrored to the rest of the world; The Polish Basin is just one region in one region of the world. But the team’s work can be replicated for other dinosaur habitats, and we hope it will reveal trends in dinosaur growth.

“There were so many exciting findings! It was very interesting to discover all the fantastic coprolite supplements and unusual diets. The most exciting thing for me was that we could take seemingly uninteresting and possibly disgusting fossils and combine disparate data sources to gain unprecedented understanding. “It’s about the ecology and feeding adaptations of the first dinosaurs,” Kvarnström said.

“We now have a good model that we can test and compare with other parts of the world. We are extremely interested in this issue and we realize how much time and effort it will take this time. But we are ready for it!”

Great friends. Poop is waiting. The study was published on: Nature.