Physiology of dinosaurs and that this was a feature they shared with birds. In 2007 Oliver Wings reviewed references to gastroliths in scientific literature and found considerable confusion, starting with the lack of an agreed and objective definition of "gastrolith". He found that swallowed hard stones or grit can assist digestion in birds that mainly feed on grain but may not be essential—and that birds that eat insects in summer and grain in winter usually get rid of the stones and grit in summer. Gastroliths have often been described as important for sauropod dinosaurs, whose diet of vegetation required very thorough digestion, but
Physiology of dinosaurs endotherms, the larger forms could have been inertial homeotherms, or that many dinosaurs could have had intermediate metabolic rates. The earliest dinosaurs were almost certainly predators, and shared several predatory features with their nearest non-dinosaur relatives like "Lagosuchus", including: relatively large, curved, blade-like teeth in large, wide-opening jaws that closed like scissors; relatively small abdomens, as carnivores do not require large digestive systems. Later dinosaurs regarded as predators sometimes grew much larger, but retained the same set of features. Instead of chewing their food, these predators swallowed it whole. The feeding habits of ornithomimosaurs and oviraptorosaurs are a mystery: although