A Tiny Reason for Big Dinosaurs to Gather Together - Scientific American Blog Network
'Modern herbivores get around this problem by becoming “infected” with appropriate gut bacteria, often by ingesting feces of their parents or neighbors. '
'Other assemblages where young dinosaurs hung around with adults, like the Centrosaurus bonebeds of Alberta, could also be signs of the need to transfer gut bacteria. '
'Unless fossils of the plant-dissolving bacteria were preserved and can be identified from fossil gut contents, it may be hard to test this idea. '
'We know little of dinosaur digestive systems - mostly revealed to us as gut contents, petrified poop, and other end products of digestion - and the social trend doesn’t seem to be universal. '
'Yet dinosaurs were real animals, and, like animals alive today, they were actually ecosystems themselves. '
[–] derram ago
https://archive.fo/0XQ5A :
'Modern herbivores get around this problem by becoming “infected” with appropriate gut bacteria, often by ingesting feces of their parents or neighbors. '
'Other assemblages where young dinosaurs hung around with adults, like the Centrosaurus bonebeds of Alberta, could also be signs of the need to transfer gut bacteria. '
'Unless fossils of the plant-dissolving bacteria were preserved and can be identified from fossil gut contents, it may be hard to test this idea. '
'We know little of dinosaur digestive systems - mostly revealed to us as gut contents, petrified poop, and other end products of digestion - and the social trend doesn’t seem to be universal. '
'Yet dinosaurs were real animals, and, like animals alive today, they were actually ecosystems themselves. '
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