ScienceDaily (Oct. 4, 2012) — A team of
paleontologists and engineers has found that duck-billed dinosaurs had
an amazing capacity to chew tough and abrasive plants with grinding
teeth more complex than those of cows, horses, and other well-known
modern grazers. Their study, which is published October 4 in the journal
Science, is the first to recover material properties from fossilized teeth.
Duck-bill dinosaurs, also known as hadrosaurids, were the dominant
plant-eaters in what are now Europe, North America, and Asia during the
Late Cretaceous about 85 million years ago. With broad jaws bearing as
many as 1,400 teeth, hadrosaurids were previously thought to have
chewing surfaces similar to other reptiles, which have teeth composed of
just two tissues -- enamel, a hard hypermineralized material, and
orthodentine, a soft bonelike tissue. But paleontologists who study the
fossilized teeth of these animals in detail suspected that they were not
that simple.
Continued: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121004141753.htm
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