Experts find dinosaur poo fossil that shows what they ate 200m years ago

Researchers in Sweden have been able to identify undigested food remains, plants and prey in the fossilised faeces of dinosaurs. The analyses of hundreds of samples provide clues about the role dinosaurs played in the ecosystem around 200 million years ago.

“Piecing together ‘who ate whom’ in the past is true detective work,” says Martin Qvarnström, researcher at the Department of Organismal Biology at Uppsala University and lead author of the study. “Being able to examine what animals ate and how they interacted with their environment helps us understand what enabled dinosaurs to be so successful.”

Palaeontologists from Uppsala University, in collaboration with researchers from Norway, Poland and Hungary, have examined hundreds of samples using x-ray techniques to visualise the hidden, internal parts of the fossilised faeces, known as coprolites, in detail. By identifying undigested food remains, plants and prey, they have recreated the structure of the ecosystems at the time when dinosaurs began their success story.

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The study focused on a previously underexplored region, Polish Basin, located in the Late Triassic time in the in the northern parts of the supercontinent Pangea. The researchers built up a comprehensive picture of the Triassic and Jurassic ecosystems (from about 230 to 200 million years ago) by combining the information from the coprolites with climate data and information from other fossils: plants, bite marks, vomit, footprints and bones.

The coprolites contained remains of fish, insects, larger animals and plants, some of which were unusually well preserved, including small beetles and semi-complete