LiveScience has an interesting story about sauropod dinosaurs. It seems that their leafy meals were probably a whole lot more hearty, wholesome, and nutrient packed than previously thought. This research appeared in the journal Palaeontology.
The conventional wisdom about the big plant-eating dinosaurs, like Brachiosaurus and Argentinosaurus, is that they had to eat huge amounts of leaves all day to grow to their massive sizes. Scientists came to that conclusion in part because the sorts of plants available millions of years ago were nutritionally poor and in part because the believed the high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere would have decreased the nutritional value of those plants.
But a new paper published July 11 in the journal Palaeontology suggests that this idea might be wrong. The researchers grew plants under superhigh CO2 levels like those found in the Mesozoic era (252 million to 66 million years ago, including the Cretaceous, Jurassic and Triassic periods), discovering that the vegetation's leaves had similar levels of nutrition to those of modern plants. [25 Amazing Ancient Beasts]
The leaves' nutritional value, tested by fermenting them and studying the gasproduced as a byproduct of that process, was marginally lower, on average, in higher-CO2 environments, but not significantly so, the study found. And some plants didn't become less nutritious at all.
