Basal sauropod silhouette Français : Silhouette de sauropode basal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday the U.K. Mail posted a story with the headline, “Did dinosaurs cause climate change? Huge creatures may have contributed to their own demise because they produced so much flatulence, say scientists .”

Maybe it’s just me, but that really seems like a bit of a stretch.

The article reports:

Professor Graeme Ruxton of St Andrews University, Scotland, said the giant animals spent 150 years emitting the potent global warming gas, methane.

Large plant-eating sauropods would have been the main culprits because of the huge amounts of greenery they consumed.

The team calculated the animals would have collectively produced more than 520m tons of methane a year – more than all today’s modern sources put together.

The article tells us that cows and other livestock currently only emit about 100m tons of methane a year. Will this argument eventually be used to convince all of us that eating beef is bad for the environment?