Hi, I'm Lindsay. And I'm Marshall.
Welcome to Tumble, the show where we explore stories of science discovery.
Today we're asking an important question.
Did dinosaurs burp?
Oh, that is the most important question.
Did they end each meal with a satisfied belch and a rub of the tummy?
Triceratops. Our search for answers to this question leads us deep down into dinosaur digestion and comes back up as a stinky look at gas in Earth's past. Our question comes from tumble listener Griffin.
My name is Griffin and my question is, did dinosaurs burp?
Okay, so how would we ever know if dinosaurs burped because burps don't fossilize?
I'm pretty sure. If they did, what would that look like?
maybe they'll just be like a little thin cloud of stone that hovers in the air.
That'd be an amazing story.
Let's ask our listeners, do you think that dinosaurs burped?
And how would scientists find out?
Think about it and we'll be back to discover if anything came up after dinosaurs food went down.
Alright, so now that we've got a chance to think about it, how do we know that dinosaurs burped?
Well, the first step to find out is to call a paleontologist and ask.
Ah, good idea. I called Jessica Whiteside, who you might remember from our episode, The Rise of the And I was sort of surprised that she had an immediate answer to the question Did dinosaurs burp the short answer is that yes They did burp and they burped both from their mouth and they also burped from their bottoms just like modern animals Do wait, did she say bottom burps?
Is that like a scientific term Bottom burps are more commonly known as farts.
I didn't know if that was appropriate to use.
I think that's a good answer to the question, did you fart?
You can just say no, it was a bottom burp.
So we got distracted by the bottom burps.
But let's get to the point.
These burps and bottom burps are coming from one group of dinosaurs, those are the plant eating dinosaurs.
They're herbivores.
Wait, how does she know that the plant -eating dinosaurs are the burpers?
That's what we're going to find out, by getting to the source of the burps.
The big question here is like which ones are actually burping from the mouths and which ones are burping from their bottoms. Oh my gosh, this is like a prehistoric Who Farted mystery.
Luckily, we have some farty clues because many of the plants that dinosaurs ate are still around in our world.
Plants themselves are made of cellulose and cellulose is something that animals can't digest. Cellulose is the same thing wood's made of, it's the same thing that's in celery and lettuce and kale, any of these things, all made of cellulose.
Cellulose is like a natural plastic that holds up the walls of plant cells.
But plant eaters can't break it down in their stomachs on their own.
They need help. The way they get help, they need some friends, and those special friends are certain kinds of bacteria.
Special bacteria friends.
I wonder, do you invite them to the tea party?
They're there to help.
So in the age of the dinosaurs, there were two types of plant eating dinosaurs.
The first are the sauropods.
Those sauropods were giant.
They're the most large animals to ever walk our planet.
So like sauropods were like brontosaurus and a patasaurus like all the gigantic long -necked big dinosaurs Yeah, the fun ones sauropods had to eat tons and tons of plant material to support their massive bodies They were literally ripping branches off trees leaves off trees Trucks off trees and then swallowing stones to process this cellulose to break down those sugar molecules in their hind guts, so in their back guts Wait, they were swallowing stones?
Yes, and these stones are the biggest surviving clue to sauropods' giant digestive systems. We do have fossils and lots of them of giant stones and sauropods in their rib cage, suggesting that like gizzards and modern chickens, how they're using those stones to aid in digestion of cellulose, that sauropods were doing that.
Chickens, or as I like to call them, modern dinosaurs, also eat rocks to help them digest cellulose.
And that gives us some kind of clue to how we know brontosauruses digested their food?
Yes. And it's how we know whether sauropods did mouth burps or bottom burps.
And because they're processing that on their back gut, they're actually farting.
Those are the farting dinosaurs.
Okay, so we know now that it's sauropods who are stinking up the back seat.
Can you imagine being in the room when a brontosaurus farts?
Be like knocking down the walls?
You're in an airport hangar and you're like, I'm too close.
I think it's one of those phrases, silent but deadly.
It would have smelled of manure.
Okay, so I guess we have some insight into how sauropods might have smelled.
But if they were the likely farters, then who were the burpers, or I guess the top farters?
Top farters! The fart's a bottom burp.
The top fart! Well, you know, this is getting to Griffin's question, and it's time to turn to the other group of plant -eating dinosaurs, the Ornithischians.
The most familiar ones are things like Triceratops, duck -billed dinosaurs, Stegosaurus.
These are those Ornithischian dinosaurs, and they're very very different in the way that they actually process food.
The Ornithischians came up with a good way to avoid swallowing rocks.
They actually have a key evolutionary innovation.
They have something new that happens, and they actually have cheeks.
So...cheeks are an evolutionary innovation?
Wait, are we talking top cheeks or bottom cheeks?
Mouth cheeks. So, how do mouth cheeks help them not swallow rocks?
Cheeks mean that ornithischians didn't have to swallow their food whole, like the sauropods did.
they did more of the digestive work upfront by chewing, so they didn't need the help of stones in the back.
They're chewing it in their cheeks so they can actually eat a whole lot more, a whole wider diversity of plants, and maintain their small size.
I had no idea that cheeks were the main reason why a triceratops is smaller than a brontosaurus.
I thought they were just like face things.
I never really thought of a Triceratops having cheeks, but I guess they do.
I guess they do. You know, for us, they're a big reason we're not swallowing rocks at dinner.
Probably one of the reasons, though it is fun to imagine how that would change dinner parties.
Yeah, you're just like, oh have a side of our finest rocks.
Yeah, would fancy restaurants have fancier rocks?
Of course they would.
So Triceratops digests their food like another animal that we have on Earth now.
It's actually something more akin to what cows do.
So they're regurgitating things in the front part of their body.
And cows are drum roll please burpers.
So I guess if cows burp that means Triceratops burped.
But what makes a burp a burp?
Is it just the same as a bottom burp?
Basically, one of the important points about farts and burps is that everything that is associated with that is the herbivores.
So it's the herbivores eating plant matter that plant matter one way or another gets converted to carbon dioxide and methane.
That conversion or change is done by the bacterial friends.
their job is to break cellulose down into gas, which gets released back into the air.
Aren't carbon dioxide and methane the kinds of gases that cause climate change?
Yes, they are. And these gases are totally natural.
But they start warming up our atmosphere in our planet when there's a lot of them, and early dinosaurs like sauropods lived on a very hot earth.
The early age of dinosaurs had the hottest temperatures since the dawn of animal life on our planet with the highest levels of CO2.
It was a much warmer world than now.
In fact, it was so warm, there were no ice caps anywhere on the planet.
So carbon dioxide levels were high, and there were a lot of very big farters and burpers roaming the Earth.
So is that a coincidence?
What do you mean? Well, did dinosaur farts and burps have anything to do with how warm the Earth was back then?
Are you asking if dinosaur farts and burps affected the dinosaur climate?
I guess I am. It's funny you should ask that, because scientists have actually studied this very question.
Believe it when I see it.
Better believe it. Because when we come back from this quick break, we'll learn how to study how much dinosaurs farted and how silent but deadly these farts may have been.
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We're back. So now we know that plant -eating dinosaurs did burp and fart.
Now we're wondering, is that why Sauropods lived in one of the hottest climates in Earth's history?
In other words, were the dinosaurs baking in their own gasses?
Right. So proving that farts and burps are actually worthy of real study, scientists took on this question, but they did leave out the part about burps and farts.
Nowhere in the report we wrote on this did we actually say which end we thought it was coming out.
That's Dave Wilkinson, an ecologist who did the study.
I'm assuming that's because he didn't want to say fart, but hadn't yet thought of the term bottom burps.
So why did he do this study?
Well, Dave is interested in how animals impact the atmosphere, those layers of gas around the planet that make it livable for us.
And what does this have to do with dinosaurs and their gas?
Well, stick with me here.
Dave knew that climate scientists are concerned about methane from cow burps.
Or, as the Brits say, methane.
Because methane is a gas that causes global warming like carbon dioxide does, and calculations now suggest that we are adding a lot of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere from these animals.
Wait, so is he saying that people are worried about cow burps?
Yes. Like besides them not saying, excuse me?
Cow burps release so much methane into the atmosphere that scientists are trying to find ways to make cows burp less.
And then it occurred to me, well, if that's the case now, what about in the past, when there were all these very, very large plant eating animals pondering the planet?
I'm assuming he's talking about sauropods being the big plant eating animals.
Yes, so if cows can change our climate, what about animals that were much, much larger?
Could they be giving off enough methane to actually make a difference to the way that the climate was working then?
Wait, is he asking, did sauropod farts make the planet warmer?
Yes, exactly. And so we started to think, well, that's a cool question.
The question is, how can you actually answer it?
Yeah, how can you answer that question?
Well, with a little creativity and math, or maths.
Thinking about how to turn the question into maths in the first place is really fun.
So I've never understood why, in Britain, math is plural.
Do they have more than one?
Singular or plural, Dave had to find data looking at measurement of different animals and how much they fart, and he found a clear pattern.
As their size increases, the amount of methane that they produce increases.
So the bigger the animal, the bigger the burps or the farts?
That seems pretty simple.
What it also shows is that sometimes you can do really cool science with really quite simple maths because there's nothing very complicated in the maths that we did.
Nothing complicated?
Like, really? Well, it is pretty basic.
The data started with an elephant, which Dave figured is the biggest land animal alive today.
And then from the elephant, he drew a line using the relationship between animal size and methane, all the way up to sauropods.
So an elephant is your highest data point.
Well, you have to go way, way beyond that to make a guess about how much methane will come out of something the size of a dinosaur.
Then, he put in paleontologists' estimates of how many sauropods there might have been in a certain area.
And then you can stack up the number of dinosaurs you've got, their size, and your estimate of the amount of methane, to start to make a guess as to how much might actually come out of them.
The goal of this estimate was to take a good guess at the size of sauropods, collective farts.
All we needed to do was to say, is it a lot or a little?
And basically what we found is that it's similar to all the methane that's being produced on the planet today.
Much of that is by things that humans do.
Hold on a second here.
Dave is saying that sauropods farted out as much methane as we humans make now, like cows and machines and everything.
That's right. His estimate landed on the side of...
it was a lot. So the amount of methane that is being produced by humans that we worry about for climate change is about the same as our guesses for what might be being produced by these dinosaurs.
That's really an enormous amount of fart.
It's a gargantuan fart.
So if cow burps are warming our planet now, what would dinosaur farts have done to the dinosaurs' planet in the past?
How much fart is too much fart?
Dinosaur methane can't be giving you the explanation for all that warming, in fact it can only be giving you, if I'll calculate you to write, an explanation for a small amount of it.
So sauropods past gas was only a tiny toot of warming.
As Jessica said, it was already really warm during the sauropod's time.
So it was really just a drop in the bucket.
So it would've kept the temperatures nice and toasty and a little bit farty, Kind of like when you let one go under the covers.
That was the whole planet back then.
Stinky and sweaty! So, from the point of view of plant -eating dinosaurs, a warm earth is probably good.
Plants tend to grow well in warm conditions.
So farts might actually have been good for saurapods.
It's the fart cycle of life.
So beautiful! But for us and many other living things, a warmer earth is not good because we're adapted to a cooler climate than sauropods had.
That's why cow burps are a problem and scientists are focused on finding solutions.
So too many cow burps are bad for us and sauropod farts probably would have been too.
So we definitely shouldn't bring brontosaurus back from extinction.
That's the lesson learned for sure.
And I asked Dave why he did this study and he said he was just really curious about the question and wanted to get other people interested in it, too.
So signs continue all sorts of useful stuff.
But it's also a part of culture.
It's just allowing people to be interested and to get more out of the world and go, wow, that's cool.
I hadn't thought of that.
I definitely hadn't really thought much about dinosaur burps before this.
I'm surprised that we hadn't thought about that or dinosaur farts.
This really opens up like a whole new field, like paleofartology.
Paleoburbology? Paleoburbologist?
That's what I'm studying.
Thanks today to Jessica Whiteside, Professor and Chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at San Diego State University.
Thanks as well to Dr. David Wilkinson, Visiting Professor in Ecology at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom.
And special thanks to Griffin for sending in his question.
You can hear more from our interview with Dave Wilkinson on our Patreon in our bonus interview episode, available when you support us on Patreon for just $1 or more a month on patreon .com slash tumble podcast. Sarah Roberson -Lentz is our editor and she designed the episode art.
Elliott Hijaj is our production assistant and Gary Calhoun -James engineered and mixed this episode.
I'm Lindsey Paterson and I wrote this episode.
And I'm Marshall Escamilla and I made all the music and sound design for this episode.
Tumble is a production of Tumble Media.
Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for more stories of science discovery.
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