How Sauropods Got So Big

["Richard W. Travsky" <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>]

Longish article at

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.400-how-the-largest-dinosaurs-got-so-big.html

Some interesting and new - to me - collected bits. Such as


" The nutrients from this huge unchewed meal would have been extracted by 
lengthy microbial fermentation inside their huge torsos. That, however, 
posed yet another problem. As flowering plants did not evolve until late 
in the sauropods' reign, their diet was limited to plants such as monkey 
puzzles, ginkgos and horsetails. According to animal nutritionist Jrgen 
Hummel at the University of Bonn, it is commonly believed that such fodder 
is of exceptionally low nutritional quality. How did the sauropods manage 
to survive on this restricted diet?

Hummel set about trying to find out. In 2008, he simulated dinosaur 
digestion by placing samples of these primitive plants among the gut 
microbes of sheep. It turns out that many of the plants were more 
nutritious than they had been given credit for. "When you give the ancient 
plants enough time, they are digested quite reasonably. A long retention 
time in the digestive tract of a sauropod would have been the solution," 
he says. "