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Most people know that terrestrial dinosaurs were wiped out some 66 million years ago when an asteroid roughly twice the diameter of Paris crashed into Earth.
If the explosive fireball didn’t catch them, the global temperature dip on a planet with little or no ice – caused by a blanket of heat-shielding debris in the atmosphere – did.
What most people don’t know is that more than 100 million years earlier, another cataclysm of climate change devastated a diverse array of dinosaur species, with many extinct.
Except this time around, it was global warming rather than global cooling that brought them in, with the planet warming up faster than the dinosaurs’ ability to adapt.
Scientists found evidence of this traumatic event about 179 million years ago in plant fossils in Argentine Patagonia.
They also discovered a previously unknown dinosaur.
The species, called Bagualia alba, belongs to the family of massive long-necked sauropods, the largest animals that walk the Earth.
Prior to the global warming event, sauropods were only a branch of the Sauropodomorpha lineage.
Other dinosaurs in the same group were smaller and lighter in build, with some no larger than a goat, according to a study published Wednesday in the Royal Society.
But a series of volcanic eruptions over several million years released huge amounts of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, warming the planet and transforming the vegetation the dinosaurs ate.
The climate has gone from a temperate, hot and humid climate with lush and diverse vegetation to a strongly seasonal, hot and dry regime.
The smaller Sauropodomorpha dinosaurs have not been able to cope with the change, but the larger sauropods – such as the Bagualia alba – have thrived.
“Sauropods are huge, four-legged, long-necked animals,” meaning they could reach treetops, paleontologist and lead author Diego Pol told AFP.
“Their very strong jaws and spoon-shaped teeth have been adapted to feed on all kinds of plants such as conifers.”
Conifers in the early Jurassic had tough, leathery leaves that would have been a challenge for any herbivore.
But this gave B. alba an advantage over other Sauropodomorpha dinosaurs, said Pol, head of the science department at the Egidio Feruglio paleontological museum in Patagonia.
The new sauropod diet saw them expanded in size from 10 meters to 40 meters in length, as large digestion chambers were required to cope.
They became the dominant group of herbivores and eventually the largest animals to ever walk the Earth.
Most people know that terrestrial dinosaurs were wiped out some 66 million years ago when an asteroid roughly twice the diameter of Paris crashed into Earth.
If the explosive fireball didn’t catch them, the global temperature dip on a planet with little or no ice – caused by a blanket of heat-shielding debris in the atmosphere – did.
What most people don’t know is that more than 100 million years earlier, another cataclysm of climate change devastated a diverse array of dinosaur species, with many extinct.
Except this time around, it was global warming rather than global cooling that brought them in, with the planet warming up faster than the dinosaurs’ ability to adapt.
Scientists found evidence of this traumatic event about 179 million years ago in plant fossils in Argentine Patagonia.
They also discovered a previously unknown dinosaur.
The species, called Bagualia alba, belongs to the family of massive long-necked sauropods, the largest animals that walk the Earth.
Prior to the global warming event, sauropods were only a branch of the Sauropodomorpha lineage.
Other dinosaurs in the same group were smaller and lighter in build, with some no larger than a goat, according to a study published Wednesday in the Royal Society.
But a series of volcanic eruptions over several million years released huge amounts of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, warming the planet and transforming the vegetation the dinosaurs ate.
The climate has gone from a temperate, hot and humid climate with lush and diverse vegetation to a strongly seasonal, hot and dry regime.
The smaller Sauropodomorpha dinosaurs have not been able to cope with the change, but the larger sauropods – such as the Bagualia alba – have thrived.
“Sauropods are huge, four-legged, long-necked animals,” meaning they could reach treetops, paleontologist and lead author Diego Pol told AFP.
“Their very strong jaws and spoon-shaped teeth have been adapted to feed on all kinds of plants such as conifers.”
Conifers in the early Jurassic had tough, leathery leaves that would have been a challenge for any herbivore.
But this gave B. alba an advantage over other Sauropodomorpha dinosaurs, said Pol, head of the science department at the Egidio Feruglio paleontological museum in Patagonia.
The new sauropod diet saw them expanded in size from 10 meters to 40 meters in length, as large digestion chambers were required to cope.
They became the dominant group of herbivores and eventually the largest animals to ever walk the Earth.
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