Aug
31
31
NYC’s Central Park Could Support 100 Big Dinosaurs
Posted under Dinosaurs & Fossils by admin
If dinosaurs were alive today, up to 100 huge individuals could enjoy a fairly comfortable existence in a space the size of New York’s Central Park, suggests a new study in the journal Historical Biology.
The study presents one of the most detailed analysis concerning how much land space dinosaurs would have needed to survive and even thrive.
(Central Park; Credit: Ed Yourdon)
(Coelophysis, a dinosaur whose tracks have been found in New York; Credit: Ballista, Wikimedia Commons)
James Farlow of the Department of Geosciences at Indiana-Purdue University and colleagues Dan Coroian and John Foster, who all worked on the study, determined that a square kilometer of land could support “an upper limit of a few hundred animals across all taxa and size classes, and up to a few tens of individuals of large subadults and adults.”
New York’s Central Park is 1.32 square miles in size, but many dinosaurs were quite large. Farlow and his team therefore estimate that about a hundred dinosaurs could have crammed into a space that size way back when.
Much of what is now the United States was covered with water during the dinosaur era, so the scientists focused much of their attention on the Morrison Formation in Utah, which clearly supported numerous dinosaurs, based on fossil finds there. This happened from around 150 million years ago to the end of the Jurassic Period.
“The ecosystem impact of megaherbivorous (big, plant-eating) dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation would have depended on their abundance — number of animals per unit of habitat area — on the landscape,” the researchers wrote.
To calculate this impact they looked at theorized energy demands of a given dinosaur community along with how the landscape could have met those demands. Fossil ferns and cycads have also been excavated at the Morrison site, so we have a good idea of what the dinosaurs might have eaten there.
What’s still a mystery, however, is whether or not most dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded.
Warm-blooded animals, like us, need a lot of food fuel. If herbivorous dinosaurs were warm-blooded, far fewer of them could have existed in a place the size of Central Park. Nature’s food supply would have been the limitation.
If dinosaurs like sauropods were cold-blooded animals, however, the 100 or so figure would have been more likely.
Add comments
