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Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Dinosaur Farts May Have Caused Global Warming!O

That's Right! According to some Scientist's... Dinosaur Farts May Have Caused Global Warming! Warming the Earth, about 150 Million Years Ago!:O - See YouTube Video...

Dinosaur Flatulence May Have Warmed the Earth Millions of Years Ago

Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Liz5YuM27DM

Sorry... I just couldn't resits that Head Line!;)

Don

Published on May 7, 2012 by IBTimesTV

British Researchers have come to the conclusion that the flatulence of giant dinosaurs could have warmed the planet.

In a major new climate finding, researchers have calculated that dinosaur flatulence could have put enough methane into the atmosphere to warm the planet during the hot, wet Mesozoic era.

Like gigantic, long-necked, prehistoric cows, sauropod dinosaurs roamed widely around the Earth 150 million years ago.

And just like big cows, their plant digestion was aided by methane-producing microbes.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with as much as 25 times the climate-warming potential as carbon dioxide.

This gas is enough of a factor in modern global warming that scientists have worked to figure out how much methane is emitted by cows, sheep and other plant-eating animals.

The inquiry raised questions about whether the same thing could have happened in the distant past.

Scientists reckon that global methane emissions from sauropods were about 520 million tons per year, comparable to all modern methane emissions.

Category:

News & Politics

License:

Standard YouTube License

Hmmm... I wonder what that might have been like? Maybe a...

Jurassic Fart!;)

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Video Link...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F0kG3pkSlt8

“What makes a sauropod a sauropod is its most conspicuous feature, its enormously long neck.”

– P. M. Sander

Sauropods, those long-necked, long-tailed herbivorous dinosaurs, were the largest land animals ever to exist. Some like Amphicoelias fragilimmus, Seismosaurus halli and Argentinosaurus huinculensis attained heights of up to 55 feet, lengths reaching 150 feet and weights approaching 200,000 pounds. Today only the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), at 400,000 pounds, is bigger. If sauropods were alive today they could easily graze a five-story rooftop garden as they ambled by on the other side of the street! By contrast, today’s largest land animals, elephants (Loxodonta africana), weigh a mere 15,000 pounds and stand only 11 feet tall. Adult elephants spend up to 18 hours a day consuming as much as 600 pounds of vegetation. So how did sauropods achieve their unsurpassed dimensions?

For seven years a team of German and Swiss paleontologists, physiologists and zoologists headed by P. Martin Sander*, University of Bonn, Germany, have tested the science behind many hypotheses about organ function, metabolism and even eating habits to solve the mystery of sauropod gigantism. Their findings, which appeared online in Biological Reviews on April 29, 2010, and those of others, have now become a book, Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs-Understanding the Life of Giants, Indiana University Press (March 2011).

Sauropods were extremely successful. Their colossal body size protected them from large predators like Tyrannosaurus rex, which was only one-tenth their weight. They first achieved their large-scale life style during the late Triassic, about 200 million years ago, and flourished through the Jurassic until the great asteroid-caused extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago. Scientists once thought it was the profusion of plants like cycads, ginkgoes and ferns, and other extrinsic factors that favored the massive growth of sauropods. But Sander et al. point out that the ancient plants eaten by sauropods were no more nutritious than modern plants and conditions for life were tougher then. For example, oxygen levels were lower. Instead, they say the signature sauropod characteristic of a long neck played a pivotal role in their huge size.

And they tell us that Global Warming is a New Thing...

Don