"A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in
sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate" 150 million years ago, Dave Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University said.
Like gigantic, long-necked, prehistoric cows,
sauropod dinosaurs roamed widely around the Earth 150 million years ago, scientists reported in the journal Current Biology on Monday.
Still, because of their sheer enormous size,
sauropod dinosaurs would be expected to retain their body heat more efficiently than smaller warm-blooded animals, like humans, even if dinosaurs themselves were cold-blooded, Eagle said.
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Sauropod skin was almost certainly dry and warm and, because dinosaurs had no sweat glands in their skin, they did not perspire.
like a museum in the ground." The majority of the finds so far are skulls and skeletons of turtles, sharks, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs, as well as bones of a
sauropod. The PaleoAngola project has been undertaken through funding from the National Geographical Society and the Petroleum Research Foundation of America in collaboration with universities in Angola and the Netherlands.
The site of the find, high in the Jura, was once a literal
sauropod stomping ground: so far, 20 prints scattered on a 25-acre site have been uncovered, palaeontologist Jean-Michel Mazin of France's National Centre of Scientific Research said.
Dr Dave Martill from the University of Portsmouth and Nizar Ibrahim from University College Dublin preparing to move a bone from a new species of
sauropod discovered in the Sahara desert.
We did raise the ceiling height of the second floor and leave enough room to accommodate a great
sauropod. But we did not know early on that we would be mounting so large a specimen as Gordo.
The fossil, which is an upper foreleg, seems to be that of a bone of a
sauropod dinosaur that walked on four legs like brachiosaurus.
"We first thought it might be from a
sauropod," says researcher Xing Xu.