List of feeding behaviours

Feeding is the process by which organisms, especially animals, obtain food. Terms used to describe feeding habits often include the suffixes -vore, -vory, or -vorous, which come from the Latin word vorare, meaning “to devour.” Other terms use -phage, -phagy, or -phagous, from the Greek word phagein, meaning “to eat.”

The evolution of feeding shows a wide range of strategies, with some types evolving more than once in different groups. In terrestrial vertebrates, the earliest known forms were large amphibious fish-eaters (piscivores) about 400 million years ago. Amphibians continued to feed mainly on fish and later on insects. Reptiles later developed two additional feeding types: eating other tetrapods (carnivory) and eating plants (herbivory). Carnivory likely developed from insect-eating in medium and large tetrapods and required relatively few changes, while herbivory required more complex adaptations to process fibrous plant material.^[1]

1. ↑ Sahney, S., Benton, M.J. & Falcon-Lang, H.J. (2010). "Rainforest collapse triggered Pennsylvanian tetrapod diversification in Euramerica" (PDF). Geology. 38 (12): 1079–1082. doi:10.1130/G31182.1.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)