Popular news headlines purport that British researchers claimed that dinosaurs choked their ancient atmosphere with their own gas. For example, "Dinosaurs 'gassed' themselves into extinction, British scientists say," according to Fox News online. Methane is a greenhouse gas and a natural byproduct of metabolizing plant matter, and many believe that excess methane production could cause catastrophic greenhouse warming on earth. But headlines like these misrepresent two key areas.
First, some of these news reports were simply inaccurate. For example, the British scientists did not say that any dinosaur-made methane caused extinction. In their paper, published in Current Biology, the scientists calculated the estimated volume of methane produced by sauropod dinosaurs They based that on estimates from fossil indications about the number of dinosaurs and how much plant matter they probably ate.
Their study concluded that, because sauropod-produced methane would have rivaled the total methane production from all modern sources, those fascinating long-necked dinosaurs "could potentially have played a significant role in influencing climate through their methane emissions." But "influencing climate" is rather different than "gassing themselves into extinction."
read more http://www.icr.org/article/6884/
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