Using these techniques, borrowed from the worlds of engineering and medicine, we can start to examine the feeding behaviour of this long-extinct animal in levels of detail which were simply impossible until recently.
High-tech technology, traditionally usually used to design racing cars and aeroplanes, has helped researchers to understand how plant-eating dinosaurs fed 150 million years ago. A team of international researchers, led by the University of Bristol and the Natural History Museum , used CT scans and biomechanical modelling to show that Diplodocus - one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered - had a skull adapted to strip leaves from tree branches. The research is published today [16 July] in leading international natural sciences journal, Naturwissenschaften . The Diplodocus is a sauropod from the Jurassic Period and one of the longest animals to have lived on Earth, measuring over 30 metres in length and weighing around 15 tonnes. While known to be massive herbivores, there has been great debate about exactly how they ate such large quantities of plants. The aberrant Diplodocus , with its long snout and protruding peg-like teeth restricted to the very front of its mouth, has been the centre of such controversy. To solve the mystery, a 3D model of a complete Diplodocus skull was created using data from a CT scan.
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