In vitro digestibility of fern and gymnosperm foliage: implications for sauropod feeding ecology and diet selection

Sauropod dinosaurs, the dominant herbivores throughout the Jurassic, challenge general rules of large vertebrate herbivory. With body weights surpassing those of any other megaherbivore, they relied almost exclusively on pre-angiosperm plants such as gymnosperms, ferns and fern allies as food source...

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Published in:Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Biological sciences, 2008-05, Vol.275 (1638), p.1015-1021
Main Authors: Hummel, Jürgen, Gee, Carole T, Südekum, Karl-Heinz, Sander, P. Martin, Nogge, Gunther, Clauss, Marcus
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal Feed
Animals
Conifers
Cycadopsida
Digestion
Dinosaurs
Dinosaurs - physiology
Ecosystem
Energy
Energy Metabolism
Ferns
Food
Food plants
Fossils
Ginkgo biloba
Herbivores
Herbivorous Dinosaurs
Herbivory
Horsetails
Mesozoic Food Plants
Nutrition
Plants
Poaceae
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Summary:Sauropod dinosaurs, the dominant herbivores throughout the Jurassic, challenge general rules of large vertebrate herbivory. With body weights surpassing those of any other megaherbivore, they relied almost exclusively on pre-angiosperm plants such as gymnosperms, ferns and fern allies as food sources, plant groups that are generally believed to be of very low nutritional quality. However, the nutritive value of these taxa is virtually unknown, despite their importance in the reconstruction of the ecology of Mesozoic herbivores. Using a feed evaluation test for extant herbivores, we show that the energy content of horsetails and of certain conifers and ferns is at a level comparable to extant browse. Based on our experimental results, plants such as Equisetum, Araucaria, Ginkgo and Angiopteris would have formed a major part of sauropod diets, while cycads, tree ferns and podocarp conifers would have been poor sources of energy. Energy-rich but slow-fermenting Araucaria, which was globally distributed in the Jurassic, was probably targeted by giant, high-browsing sauropods with their presumably very long ingesta retention times. Our data make possible a more realistic calculation of the daily food intake of an individual sauropod and improve our understanding of how large herbivorous dinosaurs could have flourished in pre-angiosperm ecosystems.
ISSN:0962-8452
1471-2954
DOI:10.1098/rspb.2007.1728