okay. okay. do you know the difference between obligate and facultative herbivore/carnivore? obligate ONLY eats plants/meat, facultative MOSTLY eats plants/meat but will not pass up the opportunity for extra nutrients and calories. except also you can't really hold anything in nature to strict rules so it's hard to define the difference between facultative herbivore (which is like. practically every herbivore on this earth) and omnivore (see: it's unclear what the hell hippos are).
BUT the point i'm getting at is. i think dinosaurs probably also had that same facultative vs obligate thing going on. i think maybe t-rex was like modern day cats in that it was a obligate carnivore (but i honestly would not be surprised if it was facultative), i think pteranodons are like modern day seabirds in that they'll eat anything they can fit in their mouths (see: pelicans), i think spinosaurus was probably more obligate than facultative
and i think stegosaurus and styracosaurus were 100% facultative herbivores. they would NOT pass up free protein if it was available. or calcium. i think stegosaurus would have happily eaten any snakes it came across like cows do today. i think that, since birds were around by the time of styracosaurus (and also might have appeared before stegosaurus disappeared???? maybe), and since baby birds are like. THE prime snack for facultative herbivores styracosaurus would not have hesitated to snack on any baby or just small birds it came across and got in its beak.
tl;dr Rodger and Caruso's dino forms are perfectly capable of eating meat and will happily do so for the extra calories because in nature "rules" are more "suggestions".
Obligate actually means they need to eat plants/meat because they will die or at least develop severe nutrient deficiencies if they don't. Even obligate carnivores can eat plants, but they cannot survive if they don't eat meat—and vice-versa for obligate herbivores. (For example, no matter how much my cat loves yams, if I fed her nothing but yams, she would die of malnutrition because she is an obligate carnivore and requires meat. That doesn't stop her from being safely able to digest yams.)
Very few herbivores are actually completely unable to digest meat. And vice-versa for carnivores.
Facultative, meanwhile, refers to creatures like, for example: Pandas who are classified as facultative carnivores. Based on their historical diet and digestive system, they are biologically carnivores, but most pandas today survive almost exclusively on bamboo, a plant, because that is the most abundant food source available to them, and most animal diets are primarily opportunistic.
Basically, like you said, in nature, "rules" are more "suggestions."
That said, I think it's funny to imagine Caruso and Rodger inexplicably craving salad, Max inexplicably craving meat, and Fiona and Buzz inexplicably craving fish after they become dinosaurs. And it's all made up anyway, so I can do that : )
