This ancient animal was one of the first to eat plants on land

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the first animals to crawl onto land were strict meat-eaters, even as plants had already taken over the landscape. Now scientists have uncovered a 307-million-year-old fossil that rewrites that story: one of the earliest known land vertebrates to start eating plants. The animal, named Tyrannoroter heberti, was a stocky, football-sized creature with a skull packed with specialized teeth designed for crushing and grinding vegetation.