ERIC DEGGANS, HOST:
Researchers have conducted the largest study ever on - all right, brace yourself - dinosaur poo. Yeah, no, it sounds a little messy. But as NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports, the findings may shed new light on how their diets allowed them to dominate the planet.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: The end of the dinosaurs is well known. A giant asteroid came down and wiped them out. But how did they get their start?
MARTIN QVARNSTROM: We know a lot about the life and extinction of the dinosaurs but not so much about the rise of the dinosaurs.
BRUMFIEL: Martin Qvarnstrom is a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden. He's not just any kind of paleontologist, though. He spent his PhD studying fossilized dinosaur droppings.
QVARNSTROM: Five years of my life that I will never get back - no (laughter).
BRUMFIEL: These petrified poos go by the scientific name coprolites. They're actually pretty common. And the more Qvarnstrom has looked at them, the more he's realized they may hold the key to understanding how dinosaurs came to rule the Earth. It all started a few years ago when he and his colleagues were analyzing a small number of poos, and he started noticing little traces of what the dinosaurs had eaten.
QVARNSTROM: As it turned out, all of the specimens that we looked at contained undigested food residues.
BRUMFIEL: A fish scale here, an insect there - each dropping was a tiny window into what was on the menu. And with enough poop, it might be possible to reconstruct the entire food web from the Triassic when dinosaurs rose to power. He and his colleagues assembled a collection of samples from the Polish Basin in central Europe. They gathered all the fossilized poop they could.
QVARNSTROM: Because it's not only droppings from dinosaurs - it's also the other animals that were living in the same ecosystem.
BRUMFIEL: So how much poop did you look at for this study?
QVARNSTROM: In total, I think we looked at over 500 specimens. That's a lot of poop.
BRUMFIEL: And the results were published in the journal Nature. They showed that while other lizards at the time were focused on one type of plant or other food source, dinosaurs were eating lots of stuff.
QVARNSTROM: The first dinosaur ancestors - they were opportunistic. They were eating insects, fish, plants.
BRUMFIEL: And that mattered because during the late Triassic, a giant supercontinent called Pangaea was breaking apart. Oceans were forming. The climate was shifting.
QVARNSTROM: Dinosaurs were really quick to adapt to the new conditions, whereas the previous more specialized animals had a tougher time.
BRUMFIEL: At least that's the story told by these fossilized droppings. Lawrence Tanner is a professor of environmental science at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. He says interest in fossilized coprolites goes way back.
LAWRENCE TANNER: People have collected and classified coprolites for decades, actually, like, even hundreds of years, almost, but no one has studied them in this detail before.
BRUMFIEL: He applauds the new work, but it only looks at poo from central Europe.
TANNER: What we need now is to try and see if we can see the same sorts of transitions between these animal groups in other locations.
BRUMFIEL: In other words, scientists need more fossilized poop. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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