Hi, I'm Flor Lichtenen and this is Science Friday.

Today in the show, how did a huge plant eating sauropod eat its dinner?

Some insightful crumbs about dinosaur diets from a fossil tummy.

They're not really chewing it at all.

They snip with their teeth and then they they more or less swallow and let their gut

bacteria do the rest.

There are a lot of dinosaur fossils and a lot of plant fossils, but just exactly how the plants

and the plant-eating dinos came together, you know, the eating part, is somewhat of a mystery.

It turns out that paleontologists hadn't ever found the fossilized gut contents of a sauropod.

That's the group of massive plant-eating dynos that includes the brontosaurus, the apatosaurus,

the diplodocus. We knew they ate plants, but not exactly which ones or how.

But now researchers report that they have found what's called a cololyte,

that's a hunk of fossil gut contents, in the remains of a sauropod from about 95 to 100 million years ago.

Dr. Stephen Poropat is a paleontologist and deputy director of the Western

Australian Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Center at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He

recently wrote about this discovery in the journal Current Biology. Stephen, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, Flora.

First, what is a cololite and what does it look like?

Well, a cololite is the fossilized gut contents of an animal. And I guess depending on what that

animal had eaten, a cololite would be quite different in appearance between animal to animal.

For a plant-eating animal, you would expect it to be full of plants.

For a carnivorous animal, say something like Tyrannosaurus, we'd expect to find

...