Jurassic cockroaches ate lots of dinosaur dung. Scientists
have actually found fossilized cockroach feces that contain bits of wood that
had already been partially digested by dinosaurs.
Termites, social insects famed for wood-eating ability, are the
direct descendants of cockroaches. But termites don’t exactly digest wood
themselves. Instead, microorganisms in their guts break it down for them. They
keep their guts full of essential microbes by (ahem) eating one another’s
feces.
Dinosaurs are known to have eaten rotting wood that was
already broken down by fungi. They processed their food for a long time,
churning it in their stomachs where they also kept collections of microbes that
did much of the digestion for them. Some of these microbes and fungi came out
in their feces. Young dinosaurs probably got their own digestive microbes by
eating adult dinosaur feces.
Cockroaches that ate the feces would have also eaten those
microbes. After millions of years, those cockroaches best able to incorporate
dinosaur wood-digesting microbes into their own personal microbiomes would have
thrived, at the expense of less successful roaches; the successful ones thus
evolved into termites.
