Karen Emslie explains how plant-eating dinosaurs, with tiny their heads and enormous bodies, found enough food to eat, despite limited resources
Our modern ecosystem with its diverse flora only supports one really enormous land animal, the elephant. Yet millions of years ago, even in some harsh and semi-arid environments, multiple species of gigantic plant-eating dinosaurs (many of which would dwarf an elephant) co-existed.
These herbivores, with their massive bodies and comparatively tiny heads, needed to consume vast amounts of food to survive.
Researchers from Bristol University’s School of Earth Sciences and the Natural History Museum believe that they did so by evolving skull and jaw adaptations optimised for particular diets.
This ensured that different dinosaurs were not competing for the same plant material. For example some dinosaurs, such as Camarasaurus, had a strong jaw and bite which could chomp through tough leaves and branches, while others, such as Diplodocus, had weaker bites and delicate skulls more suited to ferns and soft leaves.
This way there was enough food to go around – even for the biggest species.