The first grasses
Dinosaur dung in India contains grass phytoliths, pushing grasses back into the Cretaceous.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 million years
- Era
- Cretaceous, Mesozoic
Grasses were long thought to be a Cenozoic invention, arriving with the spread of open plains. Then silica phytoliths of unmistakably grass type were recovered from titanosaur coprolites in the Deccan intertrappean beds of India, around 67 million years ago, and several distinct grass lineages were already present. Grasses stay a minor part of the flora for another 40 million years before grasslands become a global biome, but the plants themselves — and at least some dinosaurs eating them — are Cretaceous.