His work suggested that an optimum seed spreader might have been a dinosaur such as triceratops, which may have weighed eight to 10 tonnes and moved at a maximum speed of around 25km/h.
Another dinosaur of similar body mass and potential seed dispersal capacity was stegosaurus, which may have weighed six to eight tonnes.
These dinosaurs may have spread seeds on average as far as 4-5km and in rare cases more than 30km.
To Perry, the work pointed to the complex relationships of living things within ecosystems – a topic especially relevant as the world experienced what some scientists describe as the "sixth mass extinction".
"When we think about extinct animals, it's easy to just think of a long list – but in fact they all played inter-linked roles in our ecosystems."
His study, just published in the journal Biology Letters, drew on his ongoing and unpublished research with colleagues at Manaaki Whenua-Landcare Research into the roles that extinct New Zealand birds may have played in dispersing seeds.
It also added to previous speculation on the role that dinosaurs may have played in spreading plants.
Fossilised plants with features that suggest they may have been dispersed by animals date as far back as 280 million years – and seeds from fossilised gut contents are just as old.
Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago, when a meteorite slammed into the Earth.
Still, understanding exactly what role dinosaurs played in helping plants to spread may be difficult or impossible to establish from the fossil record.
Although dinosaurs certainly moved seeds, scientists don't know anything about the germination of those seeds.
At the time dinosaurs roamed the planet, New Zealand was covered in lush rainforest and was a much larger land area than today – almost half the size of Australia.
It was also almost certainly home to one of the largest dinosaurs known to exist - the titanosaurid - which reached up to 45m in length, and weighed up to 50 tonnes.
