Teeth from dinosaurs reveals poor air quality
Fossilised teeth can reveal much about an animal’s diet as well the species its related to. But they can also tell us about the air quality in the period that it lived. And it would seem that we would struggle to breathe if we travelled back in time to the age of the dinosaurs, the atmosphere having far more carbon dioxide than we would be comfortable with.
A team of geochemists and geologists from the University of Göttingen in Germany examined enamel powders from the teeth of a multiple dinosaurs from North America, Africa, and Europe, finding traces of oxygen molecules they were breathing from 150 million years ago. Tooth enamel is very stable and can preserve tiny amounts of the air that an animal breathes. This allowed the scientists to discover the atmospheric composition from millions of years ago.
They found that CO2 levels at that time were around 750 parts per million in the late Cretaceous and 1,200 parts per million in the late Jurassic. That is four times the CO2 in preindustrial times. Even the figure from the Cretaceous is nearly twice the 430 parts per million we have today.
The team also highlighted a strange composition of oxygen isotopes in the teeth of two dinosaurs, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and a long-necked sauropod known as Kaatedocus siberi. This suggests a spike in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, likely due to volcanic eruptions. They were also able to discover that the total photosynthesis from plants was over double what it is today.
The team also noticed a strange composition of oxygen isotopes in the teeth of two dinosaurs – a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a long-necked sauropod called Kaatedocus siberi. This indicated some sort of spike in the amount of CO2 in the air, which could be the result of volcanic eruptions. The researchers were also able to determine that the total photosynthesis from plants around the planet in the Mesozoic era was more than twice what we see on Earth today.
Image: Michael Garlick
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