Food
What did dinosaurs eat ? The answer to this question may be found in their mouths: the shape of the teeth, the structure of the jaw and the position of jaw muscles tell us a lot about the dinosaur diet.

From Mongolia come remains of Tarbosaurus, an enormous meat-eating dinosaur that looks much like Tyrannosaurus. The razor-sharp, lightly recurved and slightly serrated teeth were ideal tools to cut into flesh. The robust jaws are designed to perform powerful bites.

Much less sharp are the teeth of this Spanish ‘duck-billed dinosaur' (hadrosaur). From both jaws grew a curved battery of teeth, which grated in a grinding-like movement. In all, very well suited to clip through crisp vegetable foods of all kinds.

During the Maastrichtian, a shallow sea flooded the environs of present-day Maastricht: remains of land-dwelling animals such as dinosaurs are rarely found here. On very rare occasions did a tooth find its way from a river well into the sea, so that we find it today in the Maastricht chalks.

Most of the plants we know from the Maastrichtian have modern relatives. During the Late Cretaceous, tree ferns, gingkos and conifers were gradually making room for flowering plants. Broad-leaf trees such as oak and maple compete with conifers.

Grasses did not appear on the scene for another 30 million years. In this fragmentary bone, from Al-Khod (Oman), there is a hole: a large carnivore ate away at it.

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