Most Carnivorous Dinosaurs Were Actually Vegetarian [Science]

This is often probably the saddest, worserest gift any kid would receive this year: Paleontologists and horrible individuals Lindsay Zanno and Peter Makovicky say in a research paper that the majority theropods-the family of the T-Rex and the Velociraptor-were actually vegetarians.

According to the two paleontologists at Chicago’s Field Museum-who i’d put inside a cage along side a pack of living velociraptors-a lot of the dinosaurs that we believed to be meat eaters were actually plant eaters. In general, they say hunting therapods like the Velociraptor and the Tyrannosaurus Rex were the exception to this rule.

Their study-Herbivorous ecomorphology and specialization patterns inside theropod dinosaur evolution, which just appeared in the December 20, 2010 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences-has detected ” 21 morphological features that exhibit statistically significant correlations with extrinsic fossil evidence of coelurosaurian herbivory, equivalent to stomach contents and a gastric mill.”

After studying 90 theropod species, their conclusion is that vegetarianism was widespread and ” contrary to previous thought, hypercarnivory was relatively rare and potentially secondarily derived.”

Most theropods [like the T-Rex] are clearly adapted to a predatory lifestyle, but somewhere on the line to birds, predatory dinosaurs went soft. After we linked certain adaptations with direct evidence of diet, we looked to work out which other theropod species had a similar traits, then let’s imagine who was likely a plant eater and who was not.

This new research firmly supports what we’ve were speculating about for a while. Its time to start out seeing these animals in a new evolutionary context.

OK, Lindsay Zanno, thank you a great deal for destroying our dreams of bloody mayhem and ripping carnage among bipedal saurischian dinosaurs in Cretaceous forests. [ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences via The Australian ]

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This post is tagged: morphological features, national academy of sciences, proceedings of the national academy, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, saurischian dinosaurs, specialization patterns