Second.

What better place to start my first "proper" blog post about dinosaurs and climate change than the following newspaper article:

Telegraph, 2012

At first I was sceptical about it, I labelled study leader Dr. Wilkinson as a embarrassment to palaeontology. The notion is just ridiculous: dinosaurs farted so much they caused global warming. But as I began to read it, I realised the bloke had a point. Lets start at the basics. Cows are herbivores. They eat grass. Grass contains cellulose an indigestible compound that can only be broken down by the enzyme cellulase, found in bacteria. So it's pretty handy that cows, along with other ruminants, have a gut full of the microbes. As the cows eat the grass, the plant matter ferments in the anaerobic conditions of the gut, producing methane. Simple. It is estimated that modern day herbivores account for 45 to 90 million tonnes of methane per year. 

Wilkinson, 2012

Cows, compared to the majority of dinosaurs, are insignificantly small. Sauropods, measuring up to 40m in length and a anything above 40 tonnes in weight, would have had gut flora unlike anything seen in modern day ecosystems. And their cellulose digesting bacteria had a huge daily income of plant matter entering the enormous digestive cavity. After doing a clever bit of maths, Dr. Wilkinson estimated that the animals produced around 472 million tonnes of methane per year. Today's total of natural and man made emissions: around 181 million tonnes per year. 

According to the study, Sauropods alone would have been responsible for adding an atmospheric concentration of 1-2 parts per million. And this is without adding the ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, ankylosaurs, nodosaurs,stegosaurs, heterodontosaurs, just to name a few, to the mix.

The moral of this story is: to prevent global warming, kill all large herbivores. Sucks for you, Mr. Elephant...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dinosaurs/9250032/Dinosaurs-passing-wind-may-have-caused-climate-change.html

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