Did Dinosaurs Cause Global Warming?

Did Dinosaurs Cause Global Warming?

In a major new climate finding, researchers have calculated that dinosaur flatulence could have put enough methane into the atmosphere during the Mesozoic era that may have been the cause of global warming.

Gigantic, long-necked, prehistoric sauropod dinosaurs roamed widely around the Earth 150 million years ago, scientists reported in the journal Current Biology on Monday.  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 said in a statement.

"Indeed, our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all modern sources - both natural and man-made - put together," Wilkinson said.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with strength 25 times the climate-warming potential compared to carbon dioxide.

This gas is enough of a factor in modern global warming that scientists have been working to figure out how much methane is emitted by cows, sheep and other plant-eating animals.

This brought out the inquiry about whether the same thing could have happened in the distant past during the time of the dinosaurs.

Wilkinson and co-author Graeme Ruxton of the University of St. Andrews worked with methane expert Euan Nisbet at the University of London to study about the degree to which gaseous emissions from sauropods could have warmed the atmosphere.

Calculations of methane emissions from animals depend only on the total mass of the animals in question. A mid-sized sauropod probably weighed about 44,000 pounds, and researchers found that there were a few dozens of them per square mile (kilometer).

They estimated that global methane emissions from sauropods were about 520 million tons per year which is comparable to the present-day methane emissions.

Posted by James Fried on Tuesday May 08 2012, 2:27 AM EST. Ref: Reuters. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, World. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0