Dinosaurs May Have Been Tripping on Psychedelic Fungus

— -- Millions of years before the psychedelic '60s, dinosaurs may have been tripping on a mind-altering substance that was a precursor to LSD.

An amber fossil of ergot, a black fungus, estimated to be 100 million years old was found in Myanmar and provides a link between the fungus, the grass it lived in and the time dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Imagine how the dinosaurs may have behaved after eating the psychotrophic fungus, which has been known to make other animal species have convulsions, hallucinations and become delirious.

It's impossible to know how it impacted dinosaurs, but George Poinar Jr., a faculty member at Oregon State University's College of Science, said, "There’s no doubt in my mind that it would have been eaten by sauropod dinosaurs, although we can’t know what exact effect it had on them."

"This is an important discovery that helps us understand the timeline of grass development, which now forms the basis of the human food supply in such crops as corn, rice or wheat," he added. "But it also shows that this parasitic fungus may have been around almost as long as the grasses themselves, as both a toxin and natural hallucinogen."

The findings were a collaboration by researchers from Oregon State University, the USDA Agricultural Research Service and Germany and were published in the journal Paleodiversity.