Herbivore

A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically adapted to eating plant material, for example foliage, for the main component of its diet. As a result of their plant diet, herbivorous animals typically have mouthparts adapted to rasping or grinding. Horses and other herbivores have wide flat teeth that are adapted to grinding grass, tree bark, and other tough plant material.

Etymology

Herbivore is the anglicized form of a modern Latin coinage, herbivora, cited in Charles Lyell's 1830 Principles of Geology.Richard Owen employed the anglicized term in an 1854 work on fossil teeth and skeletons.Herbivora is derived from the Latin herba meaning a small plant or herb, and vora, from vorare, to eat or devour.

Definition and related terms

Herbivory is a form of consumption in which an organism principally eats autotrophs such as plants, algae and photosynthesizing bacteria. More generally, organisms that feed on autotrophs in general are known as primary consumers. Herbivory usually refers to animals eating plants; fungi, bacteria and protists that feed on living plants are usually termed plant pathogens (plant diseases), and microbes that feed on dead plants are saprotrophs. Flowering plants that obtain nutrition from other living plants are usually termed parasitic plants. There is however no single exclusive and definitive ecological classification of consumption patterns; each textbook has its own variations on the theme.