A new study suggests that dinosaur flatulence could have created enough methane to cause global warming during the Mesozoic era, according to a story on Reuters.com.
Like gigantic, long-necked, prehistoric cows, sauropod dinosaurs roamed widely around the Earth 150 million years ago, scientists reported in the journal Current Biology on Monday.
And just like big cows, their plant digestion was aided by methane-producing microbes.
"A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate," researcher Dave Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University was quoted as saying.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with as much as 25 times the climate-warming potential as carbon dioxide, the story pointed out.
Calculating methane emissions from modern animals depends only on the total mass of the animals in question, the story said. A mid-sized sauropod probably weighed about 44,000 pounds, and there were a few dozen of them per square mile (kilometer), the researchers found.
They reckoned that global methane emissions from sauropods were about 520 million tons per year, comparable to all modern methane emissions. Unlike emissions of carbon dioxide, which come from natural sources but also from the burning of fossil fuels, methane emissions have decreased substantially since the start of the Industrial Revolution some 150 years ago.
For the full story, see Reuters.com.