Monday, May 7, 2012

Dinosaurs' digestive gases linked to global warming

Dinosaurs' gassy intestines could contribute to global warming tens of millions of years, according to a new study that finds a group of plant-eating dinosaurs may have produced about as much methane as all of today's natural and man-made sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

British researchers reported in Tuesday's edition of the journal Current Biology that the methane emissions of the sauropod far outstripped those of today's cattle, goats and other cud-chewing mammals.

Sauropods were a diverse set of plant-eating dinosaurs, known for their small heads and bodies giant with long necks and tails. An average sized sauropod - like Apatosaurus louisae, once popularly known as Brontosaurus - would weigh 44,000 pounds, making it several times bigger than an elephant.

Like many modern herbivores, scientists believe, sauropods probably housed a variety of community of microbes in their guts to help remove and digest his food, producing methane in the process. In cattle and other ruminants, that gas is released in the form of burps and flatulence.

Such emissions of a modern cattle are considered an important source of the greenhouse gas, adding up to about 55 million to 110 million tonnes per year. Although carbon dioxide is more abundant in the atmosphere, methane is more than 20 times as effective at trapping heat, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The problem of livestock emissions prompted environmentalist David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in England to consider the climate-change effects of sauropods.

He and two other researchers have used a formula of a study last year that linked body mass to methane emissions from guinea pigs and rabbits. The relationship is simple: The more body mass there is, the more methane produced.

For their study, Wilkinson and his colleagues had to make some assumptions - for example, that the ratio of body size to a gas produced is the same for small and extremely large animals. "This is a bit dodgy thing to do," Wilkinson admitted, "but in this case there is no other option."

The researchers also used published population estimates from the Late Jurassic (about 161 to 145 million years) to assess how many sauropods were roaming the Earth at the time.

Overall, the team concluded, sauropods were likely to produce in the order of 572 million tons of methane per year - more than five times as much methane as a modern cattle and other ruminants. Today, all the emissions from animals and such human activities as burning natural gas and collect garbage in landfills is estimated to produce 550 million to 660 million tons of methane per year, the researchers said.

Wilkinson said he expected to find that the dinosaurs may have been only slightly more productive than today's animals. The results, he said, "I was surprised."

It would take more study of the ancient climate to find out whether and how, sauropods warmed Earth's atmosphere during the Mesozoic era, said Marcus Clauss, a digestive physiologist at the University of Zurich who helped develop the formula for determining methane emissions from body mass.

Wilkinson's team was not the first to suspect that Earth's ancient behemoths were responsible for some climate change: A 2010 study in the journal Nature Geoscience has found that atmospheric methane levels fell in America once native megafauna such as mammoths and giant ground sloths became extinct - about the same time that People came on the continent.


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