Why are long-necked dinosaurs gigantic?

(Large size of Sauropod long-necked dinosaurs are they eating plant food? Scientists are still debating this issue.

Sauropods are the largest terrestrial animals ever to walk on earth - but why are they so big? A decade ago, a group of plant ecologists from South Africa said that this was due to the nature of the food that plants had eaten. However, the number of dinosaur researchers supporting this idea has decreased. Dr. David Wilkinson and Professor Graeme Ruxton of Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) in Andrews Road, Scotland think this idea still needs to be debated.

The results were published in the journal Funtional Ecology published by the British Ecological Association this month. They argue that this mistake occurs because some scientists are confused by two different problems in thinking about this, namely how much energy in plants with how much nitrogen in plants. The ideas of South Africans are based on nitrogen content, not the total energy in plant foods.

Dr. Wilkinson and Professor Ruxton argue that the South African idea of ​​the large, long-necked Sauropod based on the nature of the plant food they eat is still a struggle to explain the size of the them. There are also opinions that these ideas have been removed soon, new jobs will continue to develop this theory.

Dr. David M Wilkinson - an ecologist of LJMU High School of Natural Science and Psychology explained: "This new study is a first attempt to calculate in more detail the above idea. shows that it may be the advantage of the younger Sauropod generation to try to get nitrogen enough to have a metabolic-like modern mammal, but this would be impossible for the grown-up because it is really dangerous for large size animals because of the overheating during metabolic processes. '

In addition, it will also be able to benefit young dinosaurs when eating meat, and it will also help them get more nitrogen. With mature dinosaurs, they take advantage of their size advantage to 'process' plants in order to obtain a large amount of scarce nitrogen, as suggested in the 2002 study. their ability to put more energy into their bodies than they needed.

A mammal (and possibly the long-necked dinosaurs) will discard this excess energy when radiating heat, but this is not possible for a really big dinosaur. So it is even possible to surmise that large dinosaurs may have had fat bumps like modern camels today.