A photo from open sources
Everyone knows that the herbivorous dinosaurs that inhabited millions of years ago, were the largest animals on Earth. Naturally, such huge creatures required significant the amount of food that, digesting, went out already in the form excrement. Mesozoic era in which dinosaurs existed, was very long, and the number of these giants inhabiting our planet, there were many thousands of individuals. So quite the question is natural – where did that number of biological waste left over for many years of dinosaurs? Today, the function of natural wildlife manure scavengers sell dung beetles, as well as flies. However, during the Mesozoic, these insects were still very small and with the role of natural the cleaners obviously could not cope. So who was the main the orderly of the planet? Now scientists have the answer to this question. And this answer is very unusual. After all, who would have imagined that the real dinosaur excrement vacuums were ordinary cockroaches. True, more precisely, cockroaches were not quite ordinary, and families living in the era of the Mesozoic era Blattulidae, long extinct. Specialists of the Institute of Geology Academy of Sciences of the Slovak Republic together with scientists from other countries carefully studied the petrified cockroach stuck in Amber more than 120 million years ago. The result of research was revealed that this insect lived in southern Lebanon and belonged to the family Blattulidae. A drop of amber is excellent not only the cockroach itself was preserved, but also pieces of its feces – coprolites. Using a special X-ray microtomography method scientists managed to create a three-dimensional virtual model of a frozen cockroach with its coprolites. Microparticles found in coprolites wood, similar to those particles that were found in excrement of dinosaurs. Researchers rightly suggested that the wood found came into the food of the cockroach as part of the eaten them manure dinosaurs. Insects cannot decompose wood by yourself. But scientists found fragments in the gut of a cockroach wood subjected to biochemical processing. Probably, according to Slovak scientists, wood got inside cockroaches along with the litter of herbivorous dinosaurs. Perhaps dinosaurs and cockroaches of the family Blattulidae coexisted in one period, and when the giants died out, their fate befell cockroaches as well lack of their main type of food. However, the taste for droppings the animals of the cockroaches did not dry up and after many millions of years. So, some modern species of these insects are not averse to snack feces of bats and birds.
Dinosaurs Insects
