Did dinosaur farts influence the climate of their time?

Modern representation of an apatosaur. The model species for which annual methane emissions were calculated, Apatosaurus louisæ, lived 154 to 150 million years ago during Upper Jurassic. © Wikimedia common , DP

The flatulence of current herbivore animals contributes to global warming by releasing several million tonnes of methane per year. But by the way, dinosaurs also fed on plants ... Did they have an influence on the Mesozoic climate? It really seems like yes. Scientists alone believe that sauropods produced half a billion tonnes of this powerful greenhouse gas each year ...

The sauropods have held key positions within ecosystems between the Middle Jurassic and Upper Cretaceous. Their sizes and weights could reach impressive values. Argentinainosaur was about 30 meters long and weighed between 80 and 100 tons. Another particularity, all the dinosaurs of this group were herbivores .

Like our current cows, they had to shelter in their intestines symbiotic bacteria allowing them to digest the plants ... while producing methane. This gas, released by flatulence , has the ability to capture and imprison the infrared radiation emitted by the sun and therefore contributes to global warming . By itself, current ruminant herbivores release 50 to 100 million tonnes of this powerful greenhouse gas each year. This figure is not negligible. Some countries have even come to want to reduce the number of ruminants on their territories to reduce the release of methane, as in the case of Australia .

A British team led by David Wilkinson , Liverpool John Moores University, was interested in this issue but ... in the time of the dinosaurs. Indeed, the average temperature of the Earth at the time, during the Mesozoic era, was 10 ° C higher than the current value. Could the climate of the Earth between 65 and 250 million years ago have been influenced by sauropod farts? The answer, published in the journal Current Biology , is positive. These animals produced as much methane a year as all of our current sources of emissions!

An Allosaurus fragilis in pursuit of an Apatosaurus louisæ within the Carnegie Museum. This herbivorous dinosaur could reach a length of 22 meters and had to weigh about 20 tons. © Kordite, Flickr, CC by-nc 2.0

Dinosaurs were real methane plants

Only a succession of estimates makes it possible to conduct this type of study. The number of herbivores that lived in the Mesozoic is impossible to estimate from the fossil record . David Wilkinson therefore used available information on the assumed physiology and metabolism of dinosaurs to determine the number of individuals of Apatosaurus louisæ , a medium-sized species selected as a model, that occupied the green spaces of the Globe. With a small margin of safety, the answer is about 10 per km².

It remains to be seen how many liters of methane were produced by a single individual. This value was estimated using a formula developed for current non-ruminant herbivores such as the horse or goat. The quantity of gas released per day and per individual is in liters to 0.18 which multiplies the weight of the animal (in kg ) raised by 0.97. An average adult Apatosaurus louisæ emitted 2.975 liters of gas per day into the atmosphere , ie 1.9 kg.

The multiplication of this result by 10 (the estimated number of sauropods per km²), then by 365, the number of days in a year, provides the total production of CH 4 per km² and per year, or 6.9 tonnes. Lastly, the areas favorable to the life of the herbivores covered an area of ​​75 million km², which is half of the land surface of the Globe. The result is surprising, the diplodocus and other behemoths emitted 520 million tonnes of methane into the atmosphere per year, five times more than the current animals.

The herbivorous dinosaurs and their symbionts (that is, their symbiotic bacteria) would certainly have influenced the climate of the time alone. Of course, this work remains theoretical. To answer in advance the most skeptical, the authors emphasize that even a quantity two times less could have had an influence on the climate. For information, current emissions of methane, from all sources , would oscillate between 500 and 600 million tons per year, and are therefore of the same order of magnitude ...

This article appeared first on https://www.futura-sciences.com/planete/actualites/paleontologie-pets-dinosaures-ont-ils-influence-climat-leur-epoque-38656/
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