Environment

Dinosaur teeth reveal prehistoric air quality was pretty awful, actually

Dinosaur teeth reveal prehistoric air quality was pretty awful, actually
Who knew that the enamel on fossilized dinosaur teeth contained secrets – like ancient isotropic traces of oxygen?
Who knew that the enamel on fossilized dinosaur teeth contained secrets – like ancient isotropic traces of oxygen?
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Who knew that the enamel on fossilized dinosaur teeth contained secrets – like ancient isotropic traces of oxygen?
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Who knew that the enamel on fossilized dinosaur teeth contained secrets – like ancient isotropic traces of oxygen?
Kaatedocus – one of the dinosaurs whose teeth the researchers analyzed – at the Museum voor Natuurwetenschappen in Brussels, Belgium
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Kaatedocus – one of the dinosaurs whose teeth the researchers analyzed – at the Museum voor Natuurwetenschappen in Brussels, Belgium
The tooth of a Tyrannosaurus rex – like the teeth analyzed in this study – found in Alberta, Canada
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The tooth of a Tyrannosaurus rex – like the teeth analyzed in this study – found in Alberta, Canada
Teeth from this specimen of a Camarasaurus, found in the Morrison Formation, USA, were also examined by the research team
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Teeth from this specimen of a Camarasaurus, found in the Morrison Formation, USA, were also examined by the research team
This fossilized tooth from a Europasaurus was analyzed by the international research team at the Universities of Göttingen, Mainz and Bochum
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This fossilized tooth from a Europasaurus was analyzed by the international research team at the Universities of Göttingen, Mainz and Bochum
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Fossilized dinosaur teeth can reveal a lot more than just how these creatures ate and who they were related to – they can also tell us what the air was like in prehistoric times. As it turns out, humans might have found it hard to breathe if we were around the same time as dinosaurs, because there was a lot more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than you'd expect.

That's from a fascinating study by a team of geochemists and geologists at the University of Göttingen in Germany. The researchers looked at enamel powders off of teeth from several dinosaurs found in North America, Africa, and Europe, in which they found isotopic traces of oxygen molecules they breathed as far back as 150 million years ago.

A strange place to look for an indicator of air quality, I know. But since tooth enamel is extremely stable, it can preserve tiny amounts of the air vertebrates breathe and incorporate into their body water pool through biomineralization. This allowed the scientists to deduce atmospheric composition from all those millions of years ago.

The tooth of a Tyrannosaurus rex – like the teeth analyzed in this study – found in Alberta, Canada
The tooth of a Tyrannosaurus rex – like the teeth analyzed in this study – found in Alberta, Canada

What they discovered was hard to take in, literally. CO2 levels reached roughly 750 parts per million in the late Cretaceous period, and around 1,200 parts per million in the late Jurassic period. The latter figure works out to about four times more CO2 than preindustrial times. The CO2 reading observed in the Cretaceous period is also far greater than the 430 parts per million we see in the atmosphere 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.

Kaatedocus – one of the dinosaurs whose teeth the researchers analyzed – at the Museum voor Natuurwetenschappen in Brussels, Belgium
Kaatedocus – one of the dinosaurs whose teeth the researchers analyzed – at the Museum voor Natuurwetenschappen in Brussels, Belgium

These findings could help usher in a novel way to look at how our planet and its various ecosystems have changed over periods of time. "[Our method] opens up the possibility of using fossilized tooth enamel to investigate the composition of the early Earth's atmosphere and the productivity of plants at that time," said Dr. Dingsu Feng, lead author on the paper that appeared in PNAS this week. "This is crucial for understanding long-term climate dynamics."

ScienceAlert noted that the team intends to use its analysis technique on dino chompers from a global extinction event dating back 252 million years called The Great Dying. It could unlock insights into this period that saw nearly all of the planet's animals wiped out, and what came after.

Source: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

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8 comments
8 comments
YourAmazonOrder
If only the dinosaurs knew what we know now, they wouldn't have been burning so many fossil fuels...
Oh. Wait...
Wavmakr
So poor air quality...........no wonder they all disappeared!........Shocker!
McDesign
The 0.04% volume fraction of CO2 in the air now is vanishingly small . Do you folks understand this? Four times, or even ten times the current concentration would make ZERO difference in breathing. Exhaled air is about 4% CO2 - A HUNDRED TIMES the current atmospheric concentration.
Ric
How do they figure out how to weigh the air they are inhaling past their teeth against the air (mostly co2 I would imagine) that they are exhaling? Wouldn’t patterns of airflow — say in through the nose out through the mouth — make a pretty large difference in the gases that the teeth were regularly exposed to, assuming they weren’t constantly slack jawed?
highlandboy
15O (the longest living radioactive isotope of Oxygen) has a half life of just over 2 minutes (122 seconds). So the amount of 15O would halve every 2 minutes. So it would halve (3.9x10 to the power of 13) times. So 1kg of pure 15O would only have 10 to the power of minus 102,000,000,000,000kg left. Using the atomic weight of 15O and Avagagro’s number the weight remaining is less than that of 1 atom by orders of magnitude. Equally Carbon14 (14C) has the same problem. 15O decays to 15N (nitrogen). So unless Nitrogen could be chemically captured at the moment of decay, the out-gassing of Nitrogen over 150 million years would reduce any measurable nitrogen to negligible amount.
matthew4506
So if we carry on burning fossil fuels we’ll soon reach the conditions required for lizards to once again become massive and start chomping on our friends and neighbours?
aksdad
Interesting analysis. Fyi, 1,200 ppm is about the same level as a home with poor ventilation. You don't really notice it. It isn't until about 2,000 to 5,000 ppm so that carbon dioxide levels have noticeable effects like headaches and drowsiness.
Techutante
The volume of idiot takes on this topic seems to be 100%. The air didn't go past their teeth and stick to it. The air entered their bloodstream and they grew new teeth which contained the chemical concentration of the oxygen and various gasses they breathed in the enamel of the teeth. Many species of dinosaurs replaced lost teeth as frequently as every 2 months. They were probably always cranky about it.