A remarkable fossil discovery in Australia has given scientists the first-ever confirmed glimpse into what sauropod dinosaurs actually ate—and it turns out they weren’t picky eaters.
A research team led by Stephen Poropat from Curtin University has found fossilized plant material in the belly of a sauropod called Diamantinasaurus matildae, showing that these massive dinosaurs swallowed their food whole and relied on their gut to do the hard work of digestion.
This fossil comes from a dinosaur that lived between 94 and 101 million years ago during the mid-Cretaceous period, in what is now Queensland.
Although sauropods are among the most well-known dinosaurs—giants with long necks and tails—no one had ever found fossilized gut contents from one until now.
“This is the first time we’ve found genuine gut contents from a sauropod, even though they’ve been discovered on every continent,” Poropat said.
The preserved plant remains inside the fossil show that this dinosaur ate a variety of plants, including flowering plants (angiosperms), conifers (cone-bearing plants), and seed ferns.
This variety suggests that sauropods, even as young or growing individuals like this one, ate whatever plants they could reach—both from the ground and from higher up.
Interestingly, the plants inside the gut fossil show little to no signs of chewing. The leaves and shoots appear to have been bitten off but not chewed, which supports the long-standing idea that sauropods were bulk feeders.
Instead of breaking down food in their mouths like many animals do today, these dinosaurs relied on gut microbes and fermentation to digest large amounts of plant material.
The presence of flowering plants in the gut also surprised the researchers. Flowering plants became more common around 100 to 95 million years ago, just before this dinosaur lived. This suggests that sauropods were able to adapt to new food sources fairly quickly.
The fossil was found in 2017 by staff and volunteers from the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum during an excavation in the Winton Formation. They noticed a strange rock layer near the dinosaur’s abdomen, which turned out to be the dinosaur’s cololite—fossilized gut content filled with well-preserved plant parts. This rare find provides direct evidence of a sauropod’s last meals.
While the discovery is exciting, Poropat cautions that it represents only one dinosaur and possibly just its last few meals. So, it’s hard to know whether this diet was typical or affected by factors like season or stress.
Still, this fossil helps confirm what scientists had long guessed based on sauropod teeth and jaws: these dinosaurs were massive, plant-eating machines that had a major impact on ancient ecosystems.
Their strategy of eating large quantities of plants without chewing may have helped them thrive for over 130 million years.
