Breaking Bad Wind

Did the dinosaurs fart themselves into extinction?  Yeah, I know that current received wisdom says that they were wiped out by a huge meteor strike, but let's not forget that this is still just a theory.  Sure, there's plenty of evidence of a meteor strike which could have resulted in massive environmental and climatic change, which could have wiped out much of life on earth, but it still isn't conclusive.  Indeed, there is evidence in the fossil record that the dinosaurs were in decline long before the meteor strike. Anyway, to get back to the original question: I've been put in mind of this by all this talk/propaganda from those trying to promote veganism, that global warming isn't, as we all thought, down to all the carbon our industries pump into the atmosphere, but is actually the result of all the methane being pumped out of the arses of the herds of cattle we breed for meat and dairy products.  Which set me to thinking, is this really a problem unique to our modern era?  After all, even before we started enclosing the land and intensively farming both crops and livestock, there were huge herds of bovine creatures wandering around wild.  All of them farting profusely.  Just think of those vast herds of buffalo that roamed North America before the white man wiped them out.  Think of all the crap they left behind and the amount of methane they must have produced. 

Then there was Africa which, back in the day, before we hunted them to buggery, was chock full of huge creatures breaking wind profusely.  Just think of how much all those elephants, hippos and rhinos were farting.  Not to mention the wildebeest.  Surely that level of global animal methane production would have affected the climate?  Which brings us back to the dinosaurs.  Can you imagine just how bad dinosaur farting was?  Think of those herds of sauropods wandering around in the Jurassic, letting rip huge farts - not would the stench have been horrendous, (possibly the reason why more of them didn't fall prey to predators like Allosaurs), but the quantities of methane being pumped into the atmosphere would have been colossal.  Now, it is notable that a lot of the bigger sauropods did die out well before the end of the Mesozoic era - by the Cretaceous they had been supeceded by duckbills and horned dinosaurs as the dominant herbivores.  Maybe they gassed themselves out of existence - choking on their own farts.  Perhaps that's why they evolved to have those long necks - to lift their heads high enough that they weren't inhaling their own noxious fumes.  But eventually, the farting became too much and overwhelmed them.  Ultimately, maybe that's what eventually did for all of the  dinosaurs: they made their own atmosphere so noxious that it killed them stone dead.  If we're to believe the vegans, dinosaur farting must have triggered global warming, which eventually destroyed their environment.  The meteor just delivered the coup de grace.