Dinosaurs might need contributed to their very own demise by passing quite a lot of heat-trapping methane gas into the Earth's atmosphere, triggering a lethal warming of the planet some 150 million years ago.
That is the idea being proposed by researchers in Britain, whose new study means that huge plant-eating dinosaurs called sauropods pumped more methane into the ambience than all of today's natural and industrial sources of methane combined. Sauropods had methane-producing microbes of their bodies that aided digestion by fermenting chewed plant material. Â
The researchers say they didn't got down to investigate dinosaur flatulence. They are saying the assumption arose while they were studying sauropod ecology and wondered whether the reptiles may have emitted enough methane gas to warm Earth's climate through the Mesozoic period.
The study's co-authors say their calculations indicate that global methane emissions from sauropods alone can have reached 520 million tons per year - an amount equivalent to all modern-day methane emissions combined. Against this, the flatulence of contemporary cows and other ruminant animals accounts for under 50 to 100 hundreds methane emissions per year.
The study is published inside the journal, Current Biology.
From WhatNewsToday.net
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