#insect biology
I love seeing people learn for the first time just how mind-meltingly vast and ancient the arthropods are.
Grasshoppers as a group are around 250 millions years old. To put that in perspective, the first dinosaurs showed up 230 million years ago. Grass is a relative youngster and has only been around for an estimated 66 million years.
So, yes, dinosaurs are also older than grass.
What were grasshoppers (and herbivorous dinosaurs) eating before there was grass to hop on? Get ready for a very not-exciting answer; they were just eating other older plants that were not grass. Plants first took to land around 700 million years ago.
Luckily grasshoppers are not particularly picky about what they will put in their mouth-holes. Some are perfectly happy to dine on meat when it’s available, even the meat of other grasshoppers. The evolutionary pitch for grasshoppers was basically “make a very hungry wood-chipper and then give it legs to throw itself at food”.
Nowadays most grasshopper species do have a preference for grass though, so this reaction is pretty accurate:
