Did dinosaur methane make the Mesozoic warm?

[lpetrich]

Could methane produced by sauropod dinosaurs have helped drive Mesozoic climate warmth? - ScienceDirect

Mesozoic sauropods, like many modern herbivores, are likely to have hosted microbial methanogenic symbionts for the fermentative digestion of their plant food [1]. Today methane from livestock is a significant component of the global methane budget [2]. Sauropod methane emission would probably also have been considerable. Here, we use a simple quantitative approach to estimate the magnitude of such methane production and show that the production of the ‘greenhouse’ gas methane by sauropods could have been an important factor in warm Mesozoic climates.

Sauropods are some of the better-known dinosaurs, the big ones with elephantlike bodies, long thin necks and tails, and small heads. They include the largest land animals known to have existed. They did not chew their food, but instead bit it off and swallowed it in that state. Their digestion likely involved a lot of stomach and/or intestinal fermentation, thus that methane.

Climate History - Mesozoic climates were relatively warm by present-day standards, and in the Cretaceous, a lot of continent area was drowned, including a midwestern seaway in North America.

I think that this work must be extended, to cover land herbivores over all the time that they existed.

 

[repoman]

What do the geologists say about the carbonate richness of the rocks that were being recycled at the time? Also, were there any large igneous provinces then?

Drowned continents would make it swampy, perhaps, and that makes tons of methane