Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
long-deadandalready-decayedwood.Thefossilizedwoodlackedlignin,aconnect-
ive tissue that holds wood fibers together. Without this “glue,” wood falls apart. In
modern forests, fungi aid in this disintegration, which rots the wood throughout.
Then wood-boring insects—such as termites, beetles, and ants—break it down fur-
ther. Although the fossil wood was too ground-up to tell whether insects had bored
into it, Chin found some evidence of fungal damage in the wood fragments.
So Chin asked the best question of all: Why? As in, why would a dinosaur eat
decayed wood? The nutritional value of the wood fiber itself would have been neg-
ligible, hardly worth the effort involved in chewing and digesting it. Sothere had to
besomethingmorebehindthisbehaviorthanjustexercisingjawmuscles.Thefungi
on and in the wood must have provided some sustenance, but probably not enough
to keep a hadrosaur going. Also recall that
Maiasaura
is the “good mother” dino-
saur, with a scientifically earned reputation for its child-raising skills. Think about
the disappointment (not to mention hunger) baby dinosaurs would have felt if their
parents simply brought them degraded wood to eat.
This is when Chin thought about both woodpeckers and vomiting. The first
part of her reasoning—woodpeckers—was prompted by how these birds feed. As
most people know,woodpeckers drill into dead woodnot to eat it but to gain access
to yummy and protein-rich larvae of wood-boring insects living just under wood
surfaces. Woodpecker parents also do this for their chicks, flying back to nest cav-
ities with insect treats for their offspring before drumming up their own meals. So
perhaps these hadrosaurs were also breaking up wood to get insects, and carrying
these back to their nests.
However, this same strategy would not have worked very well for a 6-to-7-ton
Maiasaura
tryingtofeedmorethanadozenravenoushatchlings,especially astheir
appetites grew with them. The image of a hadrosaur mother or father wearily car-
rying one beetle grub at a time in its mouth to a nest, dropping it into one of many
competing maws, then going back for another, is too absurd to consider. It also did
notexplainwhytheircoprolitescontainedwood,meaningthehadrosaursdidn'tjust
