Really old grass

This is actually somewhat old news (reported almost two years ago) but since I don't get the opportunity of working as a specialist, I often miss stuff like this.

I was watching the documentary disc 2 section of Walking With Prehistoric Beasts last night, and the scientist they were interviewing made the common claim that even the earlier parts of the Age of Mammals were incorrect to show grass, which didn't arrive on the scene until 30-40 million years ago.

Oddly enough, phytoliths; cells that are specific to grasses, have been found in dinosaur coprolites from about 70 million years ago. This was startling, not only that grass was obviously around that long ago (and part of a titanosaur diet) but that they found five varieties of phytoliths, which is a good marker for types of grass. This indicates that grass had already undergone a fair amount of diversification and speciation; enough so that estimates for the arrival of grass were instantly extended to 100 million years ago or more!

Now truly is a great time to be alive and a fan of dinosaur paleontology. Almost everything we thought we knew about dinosaurs when I was a child has been overturned and we have an entirely different view now of both dinosaurs and their environment both. Not only that, more dinosaurs have been discovered in the last decade than had been discovered in all the time that dinosaurs were known to modern, Western science prior to that. And many of them are truly bizarre. We have the Antarctic fauna, for example. We have the incredible wealth of the Yixian feathered dinosaurs. We've discovered small, feathered and very early tyrannosaurs like Dilong paradoxus, Guanlong wucaii and Eotyrannus lengi. We've discovered the entire radiation of abelisaurs after declaring that Ceratosaurus nasicornis was a late surviving "living fossil" and a dead end. Whoops. We've discovered the amazing diversity and success globally of titanosaurs after saying that the sauropod heydey ended at the end of the Jurassic. Whoops.

Dinosaurs have never been sexier.