Yes, I imagine it would be hard to explain to your 5 year old that mummies job is rummaging through fossilised dinosaur crap for a living but it has paid off for Caroline Strömberg, a palaeobotanist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm.

Researching the volcanic Deccan Traps of central India in order to study the diet of titanosaurs, the group of super-size dinosaurs that includes Diplodocus she has found silica based structures similar to grass. "Big deal!" I hear you say and you are right it is a big deal. You see grasses were not thought to exist until 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Grasses have an advantage over other plans in that they grow from the base of the plant rather than the tip. This means that when their top is munched off it does not have the same adverse effect on the plant. It has long been thought that the ascendancy of the grazing mammals, horses, cattle etc, was the kick start that grasses needed to establish themselves.

So did the mighty Diplodocus eat grass? Probably not, well not much anyway, its teeth were not suited to this kind of diet. Small mammals called gondwanatherians were more likely to be the main consumers.

via Nature