Digestive contents and food webs record the advent of dinosaur supremacy.

The early radiation of dinosaurs remains a complex and poorly understood evolutionary event. Here we use hundreds of fossils with direct evidence of feeding to compare trophic dynamics across five vertebrate assemblages that record this event in the Triassic-Jurassic succession of the Polish Basin (central Europe). Bromalites, fossil digestive products, increase in size and diversity across the interval, indicating the emergence of larger dinosaur faunas with new feeding patterns.

Stable isotopes and predation marks shed new light on ammonoid habitat depth preferences.

Ammonoids are extinct cephalopods with external shells which predominated in many late Paleozoic and Mesozoic marine ecosystems. Stable isotope data from ammonoid shells constitute primary tools for understanding their palaeohabitats. However, in most sedimentary successions globally the aragonitic shells of ammonoids are dissolved during fossilisation process and therefore not available for geochemical studies.

Filter feeding in Late Jurassic pterosaurs supported by coprolite contents.

Diets of pterosaurs have mainly been inferred from indirect evidence such as comparative anatomy, associations of co-occurring fossils, and functional morphology. Gut contents are rare, and until now there is only a single coprolite (fossil dropping), with unidentified inclusions, known. Here we describe three coprolites collected from a palaeosurface with numerous pterosaur tracks found in early Kimmeridgian (Hypselocyclum Zone) intertidal deposits of the Wierzbica Quarry, Poland.

Fungal Ferromanganese Mineralisation in Cretaceous Dinosaur Bones from the Gobi Desert, Mongolia.

Well-preserved mycelia of fungal- or saprolegnia-like biota mineralised by ferromanganese oxides were found for the first time in long bones of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs from the Gobi Desert (Nemegt Valley, Mongolia). The mycelia formed a biofilm on the wall of the bone marrow cavity and penetrated the osteon channels of the nearby bone tissue. Optical microscopy, Raman, SEM/EDS, SEM/BSE, electron microprobe and cathodoluminescence analyses revealed that the mineralisation of the mycelia proceeded in two stages.