What Do Dinosaurs Eat?

In the ancient world of dinosaurs, there were fast, flesh-eating carnivores, enormous long-necked herbivores, and ‘I’ll eat anything’ omnivores all vying for resources. Let’s take a look at these extinct animals to find out what they ate and how they found it before the asteroid doomed them.

What Do Dinosaurs Eat?

Dinosaurs ate plants, meat, eggs, insects, and fish. These extinct creatures consumed a huge variety of different foods, from abundant plant life to other dinosaurs, but what they ate depended on how big they were and the available resources.

A dinosaur’s diet was similar to that of today’s animals. Like our lions, the T-Rex ate flesh, and like our cows, Stegosaurus grazed on plants. Of course, the omnivores ate a bit of everything, like bears. Let’s take a closer look by diet type.

What Dinosaurs Ate Meat?

The large predatory dinosaurs ate other animals. Scientists think the majority of dinosaurs were plant-eaters, but we can’t get away from the famous T-Rex and its predatory tendencies. Thankfully, humans and dinosaurs didn’t co-exist. Instead, T-Rex and similar carnivores, such as Allosaurus, preyed on other dinosaurs and scavenged carcasses millions of years before we evolved.

Like our current predators, carnivorous dinosaurs had long, curved teeth and hunted easy-to-catch old, young, or injured dinosaurs first. Some species, like the Velociraptor, hunted in packs like our modern-day lions, so a social structure and a communication form were important features in their diet.

What Dinosaurs Ate Fish?

Fish-eating piscivore dinosaurs like Spinosaurus, Baryonyx, and Suchomimus had dolphin-like snouts and pointed, serrated teeth. They specialized in fish for dinner, catching prehistoric sea creatures from river banks. Paleontologists think they may have been good swimmers, too, although we can’t tell for certain.

What Did T-Rex Eat?

Tyrannosaurus rex is the most famous dinosaur, and most of us know it was a carnivore. But what did the T-rex eat?

Scientists say the T-rex, which translates to ‘the king of the tyrant lizards’, ate herbivorous dinosaurs, including Stegosaurus, Edmontosaurus, and Triceratops, hunting them at speeds of around 25mph. It’s likely that the T-rex also ate omnivores and other carnivores, too. T-rex was not a picky eater; it would hunt, scavenge, and steal to maintain its huge body mass. Paleontologists think the T-rex grew quickly and needed a lot of meat to sustain its growth, so it likely consumed hundreds of pounds of meat in each meal.

A study in the journal Historical Biology suggests the maximum force of a T-rex was between 183,000 and 235,000 N. In comparison, a lion has a bite force of around 4,450 Newtons, and a great white shark has a bite force of around 18,000 Newtons.

What Did Plant-Eating Dinosaurs Eat?

The largest dinosaurs, the sauropods like Brachiosaurus, ate greenery and lots of it. Argentinosaurus, the largest herbivore to exist, ate hundreds of pounds of ancient plants like ginkgo, cycads, and ferns every day. Argentinosaurus was up to 115 feet long, and estimates suggest it weighed up to 80 tons. Argentinosaurus was a long-necked sauropod that reached high trees to munch on cypress, pines, yew, and redwood leaves. Shorter-limbed dinosaurs, such as Ankylosaurus, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus, ate moss, fallen leaves, twigs, or any vegetation within their reach.

Plant life was tough to eat, so herbivores had flat teeth to strip, slice, and grind foliage. They also ate stones to grind up tough vegetation and make it easy to digest. Can you imagine what their enormous droppings would have looked like?

What Dinosaurs Ate Meat and Plants?

Omnivorous dinosaurs ate meat, plants, insects, fish, eggs — anything they could find. They were hunters and scavengers who made the most of their environment.

The omnivorous Gallimimus, which lived in the Late Cretaceous around 70 million years ago, ate an arid landscape diet that included dinosaur eggs, lizards, insects, fruit, and seeds. Much like our modern chickens, omnivores were opportunists who grabbed anything edible.

Omnivorous dinosaur fossils are found in many different countries, and the most likely reason is that they had a more flexible diet.

Would A Dinosaur Eat A Human?

Yes. Dinosaurs would eat humans if we lived in the same time period. Carnivores like T-Rex would prey on us, which is a terrifying thought. Omnivores would have scavenged human remains, and water-going dinosaurs like Spinosaurus would eat swimmers or beachgoers. Humans would not have been on top of the food chain millions of years ago. Thankfully, we are separated from dinosaurs by 65 million years.

What Dinosaurs Are Still Alive?

Dinosaurs were wiped out millions of years ago, but birds evolved from a common dinosaur ancestor, so that’s the closest we can get. The classic T-Rex, Triceratops, Velociraptor, and Stegosaurus don’t exist now.

Dinosaurs were not the only type of animal around in the ancient world, though. Crocodiles, crabs, sharks, turtles, cockroaches, and small shrew-like mammals lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. No doubt they formed part of the dinosaurs’ diet, though.

What Did Dinosaurs Drink?

Dinosaurs drank water. There were many more rivers, streams, and ponds in the pre-historic world. Dinosaurs would drink fresh water from these sources every day, but it wouldn’t be safe there as carnivores would hunt at water sources as it would be a perfect place to catch unsuspecting prey.

What Didn’t Dinosaurs Eat?

Dinosaurs didn’t eat lawn-type grass because it had not yet evolved. The first grasses, like rice and other flowering grasses, began to appear not long before the dinosaurs were wiped out. Grass evolved because the world was affected by low temperatures that lessened its lushness. Falling temperatures reduced the dinosaur-era tropical forests and created the wide-open savannahs, plains, and prairies that we still see today.

So we can see that dinosaurs ate a wide variety of things, from leaves to eggs, insects, fish, and other dinosaurs. However, it’s important to remember that what dinosaurs ate depended entirely on their environment, how big they were, and what type of teeth they had.