For the first time ever, scientists have uncovered direct evidence of what a sauropod dinosaur ate – and it confirms the long-held belief that these prehistoric giants were herbivores.
Fossilised plant remains found inside the belly of a Diamantinasaurus matildae, discovered at the Winton Formation in Queensland, Australia, reveal the dinosaur consumed a wide mix of vegetation roughly 100 million years ago.
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The remarkable fossil was unearthed during a 2017 dig by the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, when staff and volunteers noticed a strange rock layer near the midsection of the dinosaur’s skeleton. This turned out to be a cololite – preserved gut contents – packed with fossilised plants.
Until now, the diet of sauropods – which measured around 16m in length and weighed up to 25 tonnes – was only guessed at by looking at their teeth and skeletons. "No genuine sauropod gut contents had ever been found anywhere before,” says Stephen Poropat, who led a follow-up study recently published in Current Biology.
“This finding confirms several hypotheses about the sauropod diet that had been made based on studies of their anatomy and comparisons with modern-day animals.”
Inside the cololite, researchers found a range of plant material including conifer leaves, seed-fern fruiting bodies and even early flowering plants known as angiosperms.
These plants appear to have been broken but not chewed, backing the idea that sauropods were bulk feeders who relied on gut microbes to digest their food.
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The fossil also contained chemical traces of both flowering and non-flowering plants, suggesting this dinosaur wasn’t fussy – it likely grazed on whatever was available at the time. This diverse diet may have helped sauropods become one of the most successful herbivores of the Mesozoic Era.
While this discovery provides exciting new insights, Poropat says that it’s just one example. “These gut contents only tell us about the last meal or several meals of a single subadult sauropod individual,” he explains.
Main image: Winton in Queensland, Australia. Credit: Getty
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