The king of the dinosaurs may have been an accidental gardener. Tyrannosaurus rex was a famed carnivore, but it seems聽it may also have spread fruit seeds, as a result of gobbling down plant-eating prey.
Many plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds. They produce seeded fruits to attract herbivores which consume the fruit and defecate the seeds. Carnivores, which have no interest in fruit, can also聽end up with聽seeds in their dung from eating herbivores.
Tetsuro Yoshikawa at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan wondered if the same was true during the Cretaceous period. He and his colleagues used information on the body weight and diet of 51 living bird species,聽T. rex鈥檚 closest living relatives, to build a computer model that estimates how long seeds are retained in a bird鈥檚 gut before being expelled.
Advertisement
The team used this model to predict how long seeds would stay inside a T. rex. They found that seeds would probably stick around for five to seven days before passing through its digestive system.
颁辞苍蝉颈诲别谤颈苍驳听T. rex聽was highly mobile, Yoshikawa says this could mean the dinosaur dispersed seeds over a wide area.
A lot more work is needed to understand T. rex鈥檚 role in seed dispersal, says Yoshikawa. 鈥淥ur result is a first step to the modelling, and the estimates for dinosaurs are quite rough.鈥�
Other factors that would improve the model include the type of seeds ingested and an understanding of T. rex鈥檚 overall diet, says Yoshikawa, but the limited information we have on dinosaurs makes this very difficult.
Oikos Journal
