Visitors to the American Museum of Natural History in New York
inspect a… (Mary Altaffer, Associated…) Dinosaurs' gassy guts
may have contributed to global warming tens of millions of years
ago, according to a new study that finds a group of plant-eating
dinosaurs could have produced about as much methane as all of
today's natural and man-made sources of the greenhouse gas.
British researchers reported in Tuesday's edition of the journal
Current Biology that the methane emissions from sauropods far
outstripped those of today's cattle, goats and other cud-chewing
mammals. Sauropods were a diverse bunch of plant-eating
dinosaurs, known for their small heads and giant bodies with
long necks and tails. An average-sized sauropod — such as
Apatosaurus louisae, once popularly known as brontosaurus —
could weigh 44,000 pounds, making it several times bigger than
an elephant. Like many modern herbivores, scientists think,
sauropods probably hosted a diverse community of microbes in
their guts to help break down and di