Cultivating a dinosaur dinner, as there are 150 million years ago

Scientists measured the nutritional value of the herbivorous dinosaur diet by growing their food under atmospheric conditions similar to those found about 150 million years ago.

Previously, many scientists believed that plants grew in an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide. had a low nutritional value. But a new experimental approach led by Dr. Fiona Gill at the University of Leeds has shown that this is not necessarily true.

The team cultivated dinosaur food plants, such as horsetail and ginkgo, under high levels of carbon dioxide. when the sauropod dinosaurs, the largest animals ever traversed the Earth, would have been spread.

An artificial fermentation system simulates the digestion of plant leaves in the sauropod's stomach, allowing researchers to determine the nutritional value of the leaves. The results, published in Paleontology, showed that many plants had significantly higher energy and nutrient levels than previously thought.

This suggests that megaherbivores would have needed to eat much less per day and the ecosystem Dr. Gill, paleontologist and geochemist at the Leeds School of Earth and Environment, has stated: "The climate was very different at the time of the Mesozoic – when the Brachiosaurus huge and diplodocus lived – with carbon dioxide levels perhaps much higher.It was badumed that when the plants grow faster and / or faster under higher CO2 levels, their nutritional value decreases.Our results show that this is not the case for all plant species.

"The large size of the sauropods at that time suggests that they need huge amounts of energy to support them. When the available food source has higher levels of nutrients and energy, it means less food to consume to provide enough energy, which can affect the size and density of the population.

"Our research does not give a complete picture of the dinosaur diet or cover the width of the plants that existed at the moment, but a better understanding of how dinosaurs ate can help scientists understand how they lived. "

" The exciting thing about our approach to growing plants in prehistoric atmospheric conditions is it can be used to simulate other ecosystems and diets of other ancient megaherbivores, such as Miocene mammals – the ancestors of many modern mammals. "

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