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Did dinosaurs cause climate change? Huge creatures may have contributed to their own demise because they produced so much flatulence
By PAMELA OWENPUBLISHED: 10:01 EST, 6 May 2012 | UPDATED: 14:08 EST, 6 May 2012
Dinosaurs may be partly to blame for a change in climate because they created so much flatulence, according to leading scientists.
Professor Graeme Ruxton of St Andrews University, Scotland, said the giant animals spent 150 years emitting the potent global warming gas, methane.
Large plant-eating sauropods would have been the main culprits because of the huge amounts of greenery they consumed.
Dinosaurs ‘produced enough flatulence to force climate change’ | Mail Online
This has become a running gag!
Minute changes in trace- and ultratrace-amounts of atmospheric gases are proffered as “causes” for past climate changes, always based in “highly-reliable” general circulation models of atmosphere-climate forcings.
RUBBISH *&!!%#*##!
If the atmosphere were 0.01% as sensitive to trace constituents as the GCMs are, evolution would have produced very different biota than we see today. There would be no hairless apes sitting in university offices conjuring fantasies on computers and issuing stupid press releases about hypothetical calamities.
It’d be nuttin’ but bacteria and mold.
great point
This whole global warming/dinosaur thing didn’t work out so well….did it?
…..it turned into an ice age
But the green house gases released from eating vegetation would have to have been drawn back out of the atmosphere into vegetation again, otherwise the dinosaurs would have starved….
and these ‘scientists’ think us skeptics are mentally ill?
Dinosaurs only farted for 150 years? What were they doing the other millions of years they were around?
I read it the other way, that dinosaurs farted continuously for 150 years. That makes them king in my book, Pootasuarus Rex!
Wow, these people have done all necessary science to determine –
the basic biology of the dinosaurs; the nutritional requirements; the basics of dinosaur digestion including the symbiotic microbial organisms within each type of dinosaurs’ gut; the waste products expelled by dinosaurs.
And from all this careful science they have determined that methane was the expelled gas. Right…
Or did they just model this on a fantasy billion dollar computer.
What’s the difference in composition between a dinosaur fart and bacterial decomposition of “unconsumed” plant life?
Nothing.
Sorry, my point is we no nothing at all about dinosaur life and it metabolism, all so far is conjecture. It could have farted sulfuric acid for all we know. The plant life at the time of the dinosaurs was very different todays.(Grasses and herbaceous plants came late on, and from coprolite studies dinosaurs rarely eat them.)
Birds, and crocodiles are the only commonly seen modern relatives of the late period dinosaurs.
I’m not sure if croc’ and ‘gators fart.
No, they blow bubbles…boom tish.
Flatus contains gases which are the byproduct of the metabolism of unabsorbed food in the digestive tract by commensal bacteria.
The exact composition (types of gases and relative fractions) would depend on the types of food consumed and the metabolic processes of the bacteria involved.
Some gas is also swallowed air.
Here’s how the Mythbusters showed that flatus causes global warming: (see especially after 7:56) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ENIzQ7o54.
Steven:
You need to contribute this entire thread, with comments to the Onion for publication.
Baa Humbug:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvuOtlpSAeY&feature=related
Is this why liberals oppose fracking for natural gas?