Physiology of dinosaurs way as sauropods. The pachycephalosaurs had small heads and weak jaws and teeth, but their lack of large digestive systems suggests a different diet, possibly fruits, seeds, or young shoots, which would have been more nutritious to them than leaves. On the other hand, ornithopods such as "Hypsilophodon", "Iguanodon" and various hadrosaurs had horny beaks for snipping off vegetation and jaws and teeth that were well-adapted for chewing. The horned ceratopsians had similar mechanisms. It has often been suggested that at least some dinosaurs used swallowed stones, known as gastroliths, to aid digestion by grinding their food in muscular gizzards,
Extracellular digestion initial components of the gastrointestinal tract are the mouth and the pharynx, which is the common passage of the oral and nasal cavities. The pharynx leads to the esophagus, a muscular tube that delivers food to the stomach, where some preliminary digestion occurs; here, the digestion is extracellular. From the stomach, food passes to the small intestine, where a battery of digestive enzymes continue the digestive process. The products of digestion are absorbed across the wall of the intestine into the bloodstream. What remains is emptied into the large intestine, where some of the remaining water and minerals are absorbed;