Plant-eating Dinosaurs Created Their Own Greenhouse Effect, Scientists Say

Somewhere in this story is a lesson about eating too many vegetables, but we won't go there at the moment. 

No, the more exciting news is that scientists have come up with yet another reason for the massive dying out of everybody's favorite giant creatures, the dinosaurs. Seems the theory now is that the poor beasts emitted so much methane from eating plants that they created their own runaway greenhouse effect and killed themselves off in the process.

We're not really talking about T-rexes or velociraptors or any of those other raging carnivores made realistically alive and frightening by Steven Spielberg. No, the culprits here are the big beefy plant-munching targets of those carnivores, the sauropods. 

Remember that back in those days, the planet was full of tall, tall trees containing green, green leaves and that these giant skyscraping beasts would lumber along and munch on some leaves every now and then. You have to admire these big giant guys and girls for eating their greens. Doing that sort of thing certainly kept them regular, as it were, but this team of scientists led by a guy called Graeme Ruxton out of Scotland is now asserting that even regularity can be too much of a good thing and that the result of all that leaf-munching was leaf digestion that led to leaf expulsion that created big white puffy clouds full of carbon dioxide-trapping fluffiness, giving all that dino-veggie-methane nowhere to go. The result, of course, must have been chaos, as the poor beasties would have found it getting hotter and hotter, ever so slightly, and then they would have sweated and sweated and eventually overheated and fallen over (provided that they didn't get eaten by a carnivore first).

The scientists' estimate is that a 90-ton sauropod measuring 140 feet in length would have eaten half of a ton of food every day and, once that food had been digested, would have produced a few thousand liters of methane in a day. Compare that to a cow's daily output of 200 liters, and you have some idea of the runaway problem that such "additions" to the atmosphere could cause. 

Have a thought for the T-rexes of the world, too, because they wouldn't have caused this greenhouse effect but would have certainly suffered from it. Maybe they didn't eat the sauropods fast enough? It's a tricky thing, being a carnivore. You have to have that balance between gorging yourself until sated, day after day, and allowing the population to repopulate itself enough so that you can keep feeding on it and live a good long life.

Speaking of a good long life, we have to remember as well that even if this greenhouse gas theory is correct, the extinction of dinosaurs didn't happen overnight. As dramatic as the asteroid theory is, it doesn't suggest that, either. It took a good long time for dinosaurs to disappear from the planet. They had a good long time to leave lots of fossils behind — which is all we have at the moment because none of those "terrible lizards" is around anymore to tell us their rather sad little story.

Moral of the story: It's not easy eating green.