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Young World
Very nutritious
COMPILED BY R. KRITHIKA
Weight watchers: On a healthy diet
Not all your rough and tough dinos were carnivores; some were veggies and they were among the biggest of the lot. Now scientists find that the diet of the massive sauropods was more nutritious than they’d previously thought. The sauropods, which include the Apatosaurus (better known as the Brontosaurus), grew up to 130 feet in length and weighed around 110 tonnes. Other data hint that they may have been even larger. The main source of food for these animals was conifers, supplemented with gingkoes, ferns, horsetail and other plants. These were considered nutritionally poor since few animals eat such plants today. To study how dinosaurs survived on these plants, scientists placed microbes found in sheep guts in airtight glass syringes that also contained ground samples of vegetation found in those times. Surprisingly it was found that they emitted quite a reasonable amount of energy explaining how the sauropods survived on their diet. Sauropods also swallowed their food whole and some kinds of conifers were slow-burning high-energy types, which meant slow fermentation in the cavernous stomachs.
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