Many palaeontologists have long thought that flowering plants and dinosaurs co-evolved because many species of both appeared during the Cretaceous period, 145 million to 65 million years ago. This now seems unlikely.
Richard Butler and his colleagues at London's Natural History Museum have mapped the species diversity of fossil finds encompassing 407 species of dinosaur (including those of diplodocus, pictured below) and more than 2,300 species of plant. They found no overall geographical correlation between the two data sets.
Instead, they learned that stegosaur diversity was negatively correlated with the diversity of flowering plants and positively correlated with that of non-flowering cycadophytes, which hints that the spiny-backed group ate cycadophytes.
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Palaeontology: Flower power. Nature 457, 1061 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/4571061c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4571061c
