Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Dinosaur farts were one of the largest contributors to climate change 250 million years ago.
The link between air quality and climate change may seem like a contemporary occurrence, but new studies have found that dinosaur flatulence may have warmed the planet 150 million years ago.
Scientists from British universities have been testing the methane output of sauropods (some of the largest animals ever to live on land), including the species known as Brontosaurus, by scaling up the digestive wind of cows. They found that the population of dinosaurs as a whole produced 520 million tonnes of gas annually, which is to total natural and man-made methane emissions today.
David Wilkinson from Liverpool John Moore’s University, and colleagues from the University of London and the University of Glasgow published their results in the journal Current Biology. Mr Wilkinson said that it wasn’t the giant animals themselves that were of interest, but more the microscopic organisms living inside them.
The greenhouse gas methane is a natural byproduct of the digestive process of plant eaters, especially in herbivores called ruminants (like cows and camels). The researchers suspect that like ruminants, sauropods would have harbored methane-producing bacteria in their intestines to help digest these fibrous foods.
There is currently no way to tell what kind of bacteria lived in the digestive systems of dinosaurs, what gasses they produced, or what those digestive systems would have looked like, but Wilkinson thinks they would have produced methane like today’s animals.
“To process that amount of vegetation they have to be relying on microbes in their digestive system,” Wilkinson told LiveScience. “But without a time machine you can’t be sure.”