Recent research into dinosaur diets shows why they ruled the Earth - study

It's well documented that dinosaurs had once ruled the planet hundreds of millions of years ago, but now, new research has shown that the manner of eating of these creatures provides even more evidence of their rule over the Earth.

The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, used hundreds of fossils of well-fed dinosaurs to compare and contrast nutrition dynamics across five vertebrate assemblages of these now-extinct beasts from the Triassic and Jurassic periods.

The changing of climate from the former period showed that substantial vegetation changes paved the way for an eco-space of dinosaurs that feed on plants and replaced reptile creatures such as the Pseudosuchia and therapsid. Their replacements were dinos that ingested a broader range of foods known as Sauropodomorpha and ornithischians, the study said.

Bromalites, which are the fossilized remains of material sourced from an organism's digestive system, increase both in size and diversity across time, and the research concluded that there were emergences of new regions and environments of even larger dinosaurs with different diets.

Diversity and eco-space

Results of the study also showed, utilizing climate and plant data, that there was a vast increase of dinosaur diversity and eco-space occupancy in the area when non-dinosaurs were being replaced by dinos that fed on both plant and animals and the emergence of the theropod - a dinosaur that fed on fish and insects, and even smaller omnivorous dinosaurs.

The theropods, according to the study, were also creatures that rapidly evolved and developed enormous sizes in response to the rising trend of organisms that feed on plants.