“But what was really interesting was that we didn’t see any micro-wear patterns as we sometimes see in smaller sauropods.”
This means that these larger sauropods probably grazed with plant material from the ground, between 1 and 10 meters high, which confirms that they were filling an ecological niche that allowed other smaller dinosaurs to eat plants at ground level.
Dr. Stephen Poropa examines some of the fossil teeth. Credit: Trish Sloan
This meant they also ate harder material, not just leaves, but branches and even conifer cones.
“These sauropods were different from any animal that lives on earth today, so it’s very important to understand their place in the ecosystems they inhabited,” Poropa said.
The teeth came together in two main excavations, in 2019 and 2020, from a site near Winton, which houses the Australian Dinosaur Age Natural History Museum which manages the excavation program.
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After spending so much time without finding any similar dinosaur teeth locally, although they are quite common, finding so many at once seems a rarity, but Poropa said there could be a simple environmental explanation for the dinosaur group. teeth.
“Many other fossil sites in the region are clearly established by billabongs, while this is clearly a river channel or similar,” he said.
“So our speculation is that they probably came out of a jaw that possibly broke when it was dragged down that river, and they’ve been left separate but grouped like that.”
Poropa said that since the initial 17 fossil teeth were found, they discovered even more sauropod teeth in later excavations in the same area, which we hope would give them even more information.
“We would like to know why they were so dominant in the Winton areas, they are often the only plant-eating dinosaur we find, we find so few of the other plant-eating dinosaurs we know were there,” he said. dit.
“Maybe they were so good at feeding in this environment that they competed with other dinosaurs. They were clearly very successful in that area at the time.”
The research has been published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.