Dinosaur Farts Caused Global Warming?

  • 12 years ago
Dinosaur Farts Caused Global Warming? - as part of the news and politics series by GeoBeats.

Did dinosaur gas launch global warming on our planet? Some British researchers believe it's possible, in a Current Biology report as noted by the Boston Herald. The theory is, that like cattle and other cud-chewing animals, dinosaur flatulence contained methane and the larger the mass, the larger the, uh, emission.

According to CBS News and LiveScience, if today’s mammals are producing 55 million to 110 million tons of gases per year, the scientists believe that based on population estimates of the large plant-eating dinosaurs, dinosaurs were probably discharging over 550 million tons of methane per year.

This is 5 times more methane than our existing mammals release and is around the same amount of greenhouse gases emitted worldwide today.

Methane is known as part of the greenhouse gases, which have an effect on the rising temperatures of Earth. The gas is also a natural result formed in the digestive system of plant-eating animals. Because of the warmer climate that was created, dinosaurs would have had an abundance of plant life to eat and thus a larger amount of methane would be expelled.

The Los Angeles Times notes that a study published in Nature Geoscience indicated that methane amounts in the atmosphere weakened in North America after large animals like mammoths died out.

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