/ck/ - Food & Cooking

https://qz.com/1084199/dinosaurs-who-were-vegetarian-probably-cheated-with-shellfish/

http://archive.is/P291O

Karen Chin, a paleontologist at the University of Colorado, told NPR that her research team not long ago came across some fossilized dinosaur poop, called coprolites, in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. She was fairly certain that the stool samples came from hadrosaurs, because they looked similar to other specimen she had studied, and could be dated to about 75 million years ago, when these vegetarian dinosaurs, with a bill like a modern bird, walked the planet.

Except in this case, as the researchers reported on Sept. 21 in Scientific Reports, the stool samples contained material that make up crab and mollusk shells.

That was is highly unexpected for these duck-billed dinos that had dull teeth meant for chewing on plants. The scientists say they have evidence that the shell fragments were big enough to suggest that the hadrosaurs were intentionally chomping down on seafood, rather than accidentally eating some stray shell bits with their prehistoric salads.