![]() We don't usually think of ferns as being nutritious. We often think of large animals, certainly nowadays, eating nutritious food. The carcass itself sank to the bottom of the ocean and was preserved in very fine grained sediment that sealed it off and essentially mummified the animal. ![]() It got carried out to sea so we believe it may have just fallen into a river and drowned and swept out to sea so digestion stopped. If an animal eats something it gets digested - over not that many hours you can’t recognize anything. In order for that to happen death had to occur rapidly after the meal and then the contents had to be preserved over millions of years. The cells are visible, you can see what the tissue is and it helps us understand exactly what the plants are. The plant matter inside the stomach is extremely well preserved. How did it survive so many millions of years? In that way this is unique - there’s nothing that comes close. It’s a basketball-shaped mass in the right place in the remains of the animal. This kind of evidence is so rare, there are only two herbivorous dinosaurs that actually have stomach contents preserved that we are reasonably confident in. It informs us a great deal about how the animal actually lived. In this case we have very strong evidence for what it ate. ![]() There’s a lot of speculation about what animals ate and how they behaved. Stomach contents tell you a great deal about how the animal actually lived - what was it feeding on? Where was it feeding? This information is almost unavailable in paleontology. Why would you want to study the nodosaur’s stomach contents?īoy, that’s a really open ended question. ![]() This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. CTV Saskatoon reporter Jonathan Charlton spoke with Jim Basinger, a paleobotanist and a professor of geological sciences at the U of S, about what its unique preservation means for the field. The 1,300-kilogram nodosaur - a type of ankylosaur - died more than 110 million years ago and was discovered in a mine near Fort McMurray in 2011. Researchers at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alta., Brandon University and the University of Saskatchewan (U of S) have had a ground-breaking look at a dinosaur’s last meal. ![]()
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