You are what you eat — a case especially true for the prehistoric creatures that roamed Earth before us. According to a recent study published in Nature, which analyzed fossilized dinosaur poop, or coprolites, the key to survival in prehistoric times was a diet of plants instead of meat.
An international team from Uppsala University in Sweden and researchers from Norway, Hungary, and Poland examined hundreds of dinosaur coprolites and identified the different plants and animals these creatures would have eaten.
“Piecing together ‘who ate whom’ in the past is true detective work,” said Martin Qvarnström, a researcher at the Department of Organismal Biology and lead author of the study, in a press release. “Being able to examine what animals ate and how they interacted with their environment helps us understand what enabled dinosaurs to be so successful.”
