theropods

Dinosaur diets are not guesswork. Fossilized teeth, stomach contents, coprolites, bone bite marks, and isotope chemistry all leave chemical and physical signatures that paleontologists read like a menu. From the grinding dental batteries of hadrosaurs to the bone-cracking bite of T. rex, from gastroliths in sauropod ribcages to grass seeds inside a titanosaur coprolite, the fossil record has preserved an unexpectedly detailed picture of who ate what — and how plants and dinosaurs co-evolved over 165 million years.

For most of the 20th century, Spinosaurus was a mystery — a massive sail-backed predator known only from destroyed World War II specimens and a handful of fragments. Then a series of discoveries between 2014 and 2020 transformed it into one of the most scientifically debated dinosaurs alive, and the only known dinosaur adapted for aquatic, tail-propelled swimming. It was also longer than Tyrannosaurus rex by several meters — and the controversy over what exactly it was is far from settled.

In 1996, a Chinese farmer cracked open a rock and found a small predatory dinosaur still wearing its coat of filamentous proto-feathers — 130 million years after it died. That discovery, along with hundreds of similarly preserved fossils from northeastern China, permanently changed how science understood both dinosaurs and the origin of birds. The answer to whether dinosaurs had feathers is not 'some of them.' It's 'most of the lineage that gave rise to birds, and quite possibly several others.'