Scientists from the University of Bonn are researching which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago. They want to find out how the dinosaurs were able to become as large as they did. In actual fact such gigantic animals should not have existed. The results of the research have now been published in the journal 'Proceedings of the Royal Society B'.
Take 200 milligrammes of dried and ground equisetum, ten millilitres of digestive juice from sheep's rumen, a few minerals, carbonate and water. Fill a big glass syringe with the mix, clamp this into a revolving drum and put the whole thing into an incubator, where the brew can rotate slowly. In this way you obtain the artificial 'dinosaur rumen'. With this apparatus (also used as a ‘Menke gas production technique’ in assessing food for cows) Dr. Jürgen Hummel from the Bonn Institute of Animal Sciences (Bonner Institut für Tierwissenschaften) is investigating which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago, since this is one of the pieces which are still missing in the puzzle involving the largest land animals that ever walked the earth. The largest of these 'sauropod dinosaurs' with their 70 to 100 tonnes had a mass of ten full grown elephants or more than 1000 average Germans.
We have some sauropod types in the audience. Thoughts? Zach?
Well, I'll have to read the paper (please be open access!!!), but it sounds a little silly. Sauropods probably had multiple stomachs, enormous guts, and expansive large intestines. Jurassic sauropods were eating low-grade gymnosperms (unless they knew something we don't), and Ken Carpenter has suggested that sauropods increased in size in response needing larger stomachs and guts to process more amounts of low-grade food and get some nutrients out of them!
ReplyDeleteYou can't get a whole lot of nutrients out of a few ferns, but you can get a lot more out of a field of them! Unfortunately, you need to have a digestive system that would accomodate such massive quantities. Thus, a size increase.
But I'll read the paper (or at least try)!
I'll see if I can find it. It's something I'm quite interested in so I might blog about it later today. If I can get the paper I'll send it to you both.
ReplyDeleteI'm intrigued as to why they feel the need to put "sauropod dinosaurs" in inverted commas. It's what they were - no inverted commas needed! Now if they'd called them "veggisauruses" then that would have been inverted comma time...