Here comes a discovery by Western Canadian scientists about what an armour-plated dinosaur ate for its last meal. The incident took place about 110 million years ago. A bumbling,1300 kilogram, armour-plated dinosaur ate its last meal and died. The fossilized body was discovered in a mine near Fort McMurray in 2011. Researchers at Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alta, Brandon University (BU), and the University of Saskatchewan have been trying to find out the unknown mystery about this extremely well-preserved dinosaur.
A USask geologist Jim Basinger, a member of the team that scrutinized the dinosaur’s stomach contents mentioned that “The finding of actual preserved stomach contents from a dinosaur is extraordinarily rare, and stomach is recovered from the mummified nodosaur by the museum team is by far the best-preserved dinosaur stomach ever found to date”. There had been lots of guesswork regarding what dinosaurs ate. In a recently published article in Royal Society Open Science Museum provides complete and decisive evidence of the diet of large plant-eating dinosaurs. Earlier researches have shown the proof of seeds and twigs in the gut, but these researches have not provided any information about what kind of plants they ate.
A USak professor said, “The last meal of our dinosaur was mostly fern leaves – 88 per cent chewed leaf material and seven per cent stems and twigs”. A team of members namely Basinger, Greenwood and BU graduate student Jessica Kalyniuk discovered that dinosaur was a picky eater, it mostly chooses ferns to eat.
The team also spot out 48 palynomorphs including moss or liverwort, 286 clubmosses and ferns and 13 gymnosperms (flowerless plants that produce cones and seeds) and 2 angiosperms (The flowering plants). The team has found that there is considerable charcoal in the stomach from a burnt plant which in turn tell us that the animal was wandering in a recently burned area and was taking advantage of a recent fire and flush of ferns. All these findings help us to make conclusions about the ecology of the animal, which involves how selective it was in choosing its meal to eat and how it may have utilized the forest fire regrowth. It aids in the conception of dinosaur digestion and physiology.
Borealopelta markmitchelli, which was found during mining operations at Suncor Millennium has been exhibited at the Royal Tyrrell Museum since 2017. The study and research on this still continues. Kalynuik a member of the team, is dilating her experiment on fossil plants to get a better idea of the composition of forests in which it lived.
The research was capitalized by Canada Foundation for Innovation, Research Manitoba, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, National Geographic Society, Royal Tyrrell Museum Cooperating Society and Suncor Canada and Olympus Canada.
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