Dinosaurs more alert of calorie than humans, reveals a new study
New Delhi : Dinosaurs that lived 150 million years had become an interesting topic of research today. From their way of feeding to moving, this giant herbivore creature had unique style of leading their lives. A recent study claims that the vegetables consumed dinosaurs had a higher nutritional value than that is consumed today in the 21st century. Researchers have calculated the nutritional value of herbivore dinosaurs' diet by growing their food in environmental conditions that existed million of years ago.
A research conducted earlier concludes that plants grown in an atmosphere with high carbon dioxide levels had low nutritional value. But a study led by Fiona Gill at the University of Leeds has shown that this is not exactly true. The team grew dinosaur food plants, such as horsetail and ginkgo, under high levels of carbon dioxide mimicking atmospheric conditions similar to when sauropod dinosaurs, the largest animals ever to wander on the Earth. An artificial fermentation system was used to simulate digestion of the plant leaves in the sauropods' stomachs, allowing the researchers to determine the leaves' nutritional value.
Researchers found that many of the plants had considerably higher energy and nutrient levels than earlier believed. This suggests that the mega herbivores would have needed to eat much less per day and the ecosystem could potentially have supported a significantly higher dinosaur population density, as much as 20 percent greater than previously estimated. "The climate was very different in the Mesozoic era - when the huge brachiosaurus and diplodocus lived - with possibly much higher carbon dioxide levels. There has been the assumption that as plants grow faster and/or bigger under higher CO2 levels, their nutritional value decreases. Our results show this isn't the case for all plant species," Gill said.
"The large body size of sauropods at that time would suggest they needed huge quantities of energy to sustain them. When the available food source has higher nutrient and energy levels it means less food needs to be consumed to provide sufficient energy, which in turn can affect population size and density," he added.
However, one of the major constraints of the study is that the research didn't give the whole picture of dinosaur diet or didn’t cover the breadth of the plants that existed at this time. Yet, a cl
earer understanding of the dinosaurs’ food habit helped scientists appreciate how they actually survived.
"The exciting thing about our approach to growing plants in prehistoric atmospheric conditions is that it can be used to simulate other ecosystems and diets of other ancient megaherbivores, such as Miocene mammals - the ancestors of many modern mammals," he further said. The study appears in the Paleontology journal.
