ONE of the oldest mistakes in the prehistoric book has turned out not to be a mistake after all. Artists’ impressions of dinosaurs grazing on grassy plains were considered as bad as depictions of them cavorting with cavemen, but an examination of fossilised dung has shown that the prehistoric beasts did indeed eat grass.
Palaeobotanists had thought that grasses were not common until long after the dinosaurs died out at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago. But it now seems that the last massive plant-eating dinosaurs munched on at least five different types of grass.
The…
