An analysis of the chemical makeup of fossilized teeth has shown that ancient dinosaurs and their prey fed on ocean seaweed washed up on land, the website infohub.kz reports.
For a long time, scientists could not explain why the tooth enamel of some dinosaurs that lived during the Cretaceous period has an unusually high level of carbon isotopes. Such a chemical profile is uncharacteristic of land plants. Paleontologist Clayton Forster and his colleagues studied tooth samples from ancient animals held at the Sam Noble Museum in Oklahoma and found that this indicator is directly linked to a marine diet.
Storms regularly washed tons of seaweed and other organic matter onto the coast. Herbivorous dinosaurs ate it right on the shore, while predators took in ocean carbon by feeding on those herbivores or on coastal fish. This confirmed that land and marine ecosystems were closely linked as far back as 100 million years ago.
A similar process of transferring nutrients from the ocean to land also exists in modern coastal zones. However, the scientists stress that marine seaweed was part of the diet not of all dinosaurs, but only of those individuals and species that lived near ancient coastlines.