Plant-eating dinosaurs liked a side order of seafood with their salad, dung reveals

Some plant-eating dinosaurs apparently liked a side order of crabs to go with their usual salad.

Scientists said on Thursday fossilised dung thought to have come from herbivorous duck-billed dinosaurs that inhabited southern Utah 75 million years ago contained pieces of crustacean shells along with vestiges of vegetation.

The discovery provides the strongest evidence to date that some large herbivorous dinosaurs sometimes strayed from a purely vegetarian diet, said University of Colorado palaeontologist Karen Chin, who led the research published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“This was a very exciting discovery, precisely because it was so unexpected,” Chin said.

Fossilised dung, called coprolites, offers insight into the diet of extinct creatures that cannot be gleaned by merely studying teeth, jaws and skeletons.

Ten coprolites from Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument contained crustacean shells mixed with rotted coniferous wood. For at least part of the year these duck-billed dinosaurs may have munched on rotting logs because they contained stores of crustaceans and other invertebrates, Chin said.