How to Use herbivorous in a Sentence
herbivorous
adjective-
The Lystrosaurus was herbivorous, about the size of a pig, with small tusks and a kind of beak.
—Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker, 6 Nov. 2023
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The herbivorous species had long necks and tails and thick leg and were some of the largest dinosaurs to ever exist.
—Jordan Mendoza, USA TODAY, 4 Jan. 2022
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If there aren’t enough herbivorous fish off the Hawaiian coast due to overfishing, there’s nothing to keep the green stuff in check.
—WIRED, 9 Aug. 2023
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The researchers are confident that the remains are that of a sauropod, a group of herbivorous dinos that had long necks and walked on four legs.
—Ashley Stimpson, Popular Mechanics, 1 Sep. 2022
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The dugong is a strictly herbivorous marine mammal – the only of its kind.
—Caitlin O'Kane, CBS News, 26 Aug. 2022
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Not so at the Pine Box Rock Shop, perhaps the most aggressively herbivorous bar in the five boroughs.
—David Kortava, The New Yorker, 15 May 2017
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The herbivorous dinosaurs weigh hundreds of tons and migrate in earth-flattening herds; the carnosaurs that prey on them are outsize to match.
—Tom Shippey, WSJ, 19 June 2020
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The ancient fossil belongs to a stegosaur, an herbivorous dinosaur with a tiny head and bony plates marching down its back, ending in a spiked tail.
—Ashley Strickland, CNN, 3 Mar. 2022
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The femur bone is over six feet long and is thought to have belonged to a sauropod -- a subgroup of herbivorous, long-necked and four-legged dinosaurs common in the Jurassic era.
—Leah Asmelash and Brian Ries, CNN, 26 July 2019
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Egan's lab specializes in studying herbivorous insects that feed on live oaks trees across the Gulf Coast.
—Rebecca Hennes, Houston Chronicle, 17 Sep. 2019
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A few of these fossils represent herbivorous dinosaurs such as the long-necked sauropods.
—Popular Science, 30 Apr. 2020
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Its stomach was full of prehistoric leaves at the time of death, meaning the dinosaur had an herbivorous diet.
—Mac Stone, Discover Magazine, 1 Feb. 2023
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It is consumed by herbivorous fish, which are then eaten by larger fish.
—Sarah Burchard, Forbes, 10 Dec. 2021
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Overfishing by humans tends to reduce the number of big, herbivorous fish that would otherwise eat the algae and give the reef a chance at rebirth.
—Jackson Landers, Smithsonian, 13 Jan. 2017
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The small, lithe herbivorous dinosaurs of the Jurassic and Cretaceous—like Lesothosaurus and Dryosaurus —are either overlooked or cast as fodder for the carnivores of their time.
—Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Mar. 2023
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The team found a large carnivorous dinosaur with four long-necked, herbivorous dinosaurs nearby Canale says, all in the same rock layer.
—Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 July 2022
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This new finding comes just a month after the announcement of another new species found on the Isle of Wight, the iguanodontian, a 26-foot-long herbivorous dinosaur.
—Mike Snider, USA TODAY, 22 Dec. 2021
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Healthy coral reefs depend on herbivorous fish, which munch on the algae and sediment that would otherwise blanket the reefs.
—Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, Discover Magazine, 8 Nov. 2022
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Owen considered the animal might have been an insect-eater, breaking open termite nests like an anteater, but it is now known to have been herbivorous in its habits.
—Smithsonian, 8 May 2018
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In 2017, the fossil bones of a Shringasaurus, a horned, herbivorous dinosaur, were discovered in red mudstone of the Denwa formation, in Madhya Pradesh.
—Kalpana Sunder, The Christian Science Monitor, 2 Dec. 2020
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In most communities, herbivorous dinosaurs came in a range of sizes.
—Gretchen Vogel, Science | AAAS, 25 Feb. 2021
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When Happy the elephant arrived at the Bronx Zoo in 1977, the herbivorous mammal was placed inside a fenced area separating her from the zoo’s other elephant.
—Andrea Salcedo, Washington Post, 14 June 2022
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One was Protoceratops, an herbivorous dinosaur the size of a sheep that lived between 71 and 75 million years ago in present-day Mongolia.
—Ashley Strickland, CNN, 17 June 2020
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This dinosaur replaced its teeth at rates similar to herbivorous species that kept up quick turnover, and, the researchers estimate, about 14 times faster than the bone-crushing Tyrannosaurus.
—Riley Black, Smithsonian, 28 Nov. 2019
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Among the best known of these is Barylambda, an herbivorous beast that lived in western North America between 50 million and 60 million years ago.
—Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 Apr. 2023
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Fossils of this herbivorous dinosaur, reassessed by experts this March, indicate that the Jurassic dinosaur had a neck more than 45 feet long—similar to the neck lengths of the largest dinosaurs of all time.
—Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 11 Dec. 2023
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That’s the conclusion of a new study that investigated the social habits of a long-necked, herbivorous dinosaur called Mussaurus that lived around 200 million years ago.
—Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 27 Dec. 2021
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In today’s landscapes, top predators such as wolves and lions are well outnumbered by their herbivorous prey.
—Popular Science, 30 Apr. 2020
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The morphology of their teeth has suggested that these sloths consumed vegetation, similar to the herbivorous nature of their modern cousins.
—Conor Feehly, Discover Magazine, 7 Feb. 2024
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While some are carnivorous, typically targeting worms, snails, and other slugs, others are herbivorous, specializing in fungi and the young shoots of wild forbs, sedges, and other plants.
—Paul Richards, Field & Stream, 29 Feb. 2024
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'herbivorous.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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