While a dino's sharp teeth could easily grab prey, they couldn't efficiently chew it. So the presence of so many broken-up bones in the dino dung surprised Chin. Anatomist Gregory Erickson at Stanford University conducted an experiment a couple of years ago that measured how much force a T. rex's bite exerted. His findings suggest a dino chomp could easily pulverize bones, which may explain the bone fragments. Tiny burrows found in other dino dung indicate that dung beetles existed at the time of dinosaurs.
Food remains found in coprolites include mollusks, teeth, fish scales, and seeds.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, in the computer age a picture can be made up of a thousand photos. Silvers starts by selecting small images to create the big picture. Once Silvers chooses his subjects, the software does the rest. It sorts photos by color and brightness, then attempts to fit each photo into different positions to recreate the larger, digitized image. Darker photos form shadows and lighter ones produce brightness.