Secrets of dinosaur diets lie in their teeth, finds study

Ever wondered about the food habits of the prehistoric beasts that walked the earth 65 million years ago? A new study may have insights.

According to the study, scratches on dinosaur teeth could reveal what they really ate.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo, in collaboration with teams from the University of Mainz and the University of Hamburg in Germany, have deduced that the dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) could be used to infer the feeding habits of large theropods, including that of the Allosaurus and T-rex.

"We wanted to test if we could use DMTA to find evidence of different feeding behaviors in tyrannosaurids (from the Cretaceous period, 145 million to 66 million years ago) compared to the older Allosaurus (from the Jurassic period, 201 million to 145 million years ago), which are both types of theropods," postdoctoral fellow Daniela Winkler from the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences told Science Daily. DMTA is a scanning technique to examine topographical dental wear and tear in microscopic detail.

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Researchers studied a total of 48 teeth, 34 from theropod dinosaurs and 14 from crocodilians (modern crocodiles and alligators), which were used as a comparison. By taking 3D images of individual teeth and studying markings scratched into them, the team was able to distinguish which dinosaurs "may have frequently crunched on hard bone and which may have regularly eaten softer foods and prey".

Incidentally, researchers did not find evidence of much bone-crushing behaviour in either Allosaurus or tyrannosaurids. "There may be several reasons for this unexpected outcome. It could be that although Tyrannosaurus was able to eat bone, it was less commonly done than previously thought," the study said.

"From what we learn using DMTA, we can possibly reconstruct extinct animals' diets, and from this make inferences about extinct ecosystems, paleoecology and paleoclimate, and how it differs from today." said Winkler.

The next step in the research would be to look in more detail at long-necked sauropods, which the team has also been studying. "This research is also about curiosity. We want to form a clearer image of what dinosaurs were really like and how they lived all those millions of years ago," she said.