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Did dinosaurs fart?

2025/5/9
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Moment of Um

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Callie Moore
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Callie Moore: 我是蒙大拿大学米苏拉分校的化石收藏管理员。哺乳动物放屁是因为肠道细菌分解食物产生气体。食物进入消化道,被细菌分解,产生气体,这些气体最终以放屁的形式排出体外。 爬行动物放屁并不常见,但有些物种会放屁,例如髯龙和绿鬣蜥。然而,鸟类没有产生气体的肠道细菌,而且它们的消化速度非常快,因此没有时间让气体积聚。这意味着鸟类不会放屁。 我们不知道恐龙的消化时间,也不知道它们的肠道细菌情况,因此无法确定所有恐龙是否放屁。我们有保存下来的恐龙肠道食物残留物和粪化石(coprolites),但不幸的是,我们没有肠道细菌的证据来确定这些动物是否拥有它们。因此,鸟类祖先的恐龙可能没有放屁。但另一类恐龙可能放屁,那就是蜥脚类恐龙。 蜥脚类恐龙是长颈长尾的大型恐龙,例如腕龙或梁龙。它们是有史以来最大的陆地动物。例如,巴塔哥尼亚巨龙重约60吨,比蓝鲸还长。蓝鲸的长度约为90英尺,而这些恐龙的长度超过120英尺。这是一个巨大的动物。 据估计,它们每天需要吃1400磅的食物,全是植物材料,非常难以消化。今天所有现代食草动物都有肠道细菌来分解这些难以消化的植物材料。因此,这些蜥脚类恐龙可能也拥有肠道细菌,这意味着它们很可能放屁。而且,就像它们的身体大小一样,它们的屁也一定很大。 Dino: 我是一只梁龙,体型巨大,吃很多蕨类植物。我肚子不舒服,放了一个很大的屁,这让我意识到恐龙可能也会放屁。 Aliana: (问题提出者,没有具体的论述)

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Thank you.

If you want to protect your favorite public media programming and podcasts like this one, visit AmericanPublicMedia.org slash action to learn how you can help. One more time, that's AmericanPublicMedia.org slash action. Thanks so much for standing up for public media. From the brains behind Brains On, this is the moment of um. Um, um, um, um.

Moment of um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Dino, the dino. I'm a Diplodocus. Oh, I'm so hungry. One sec, I gotta eat some more ferns. When you're as big as I am, like a ten-story building laid flat on its side, you gotta get your nosh on. Like, eat. A lot. Oh!

These ferny ferns are so good. I really am a major mouth to feed. My tail alone is the length of a city bus, you know. There's so much of me to love. Oh, my tummy hurts. Too many ferns? Not enough ferns? I can never tell if I'm hungry or stress eating. Whoa! What was that? An earthquake?

And why does my belly feel so weird? There it is again! Maybe a volcano's about to blow? I gotta get out of here! Oh, hell! What was that? Where's the lava? I can't see the lava! Was it something else? I don't know! I'm just gonna stress eat some more. Oh! Oh! What is that terrible smell?

Did I just step on a big stinky bug? Oh man, oh jeez. What an aroma. There's that sound again. Oh my gosh. The sounds are following me. Help! Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Did those sounds come from me? Did I just...

Oh my word! Do dinosaurs fart? Eep! I think Aliana was wondering the same thing. Humans and other mammals fart because of digestion.

My name is Callie Moore. I manage the fossil collection at the University of Montana in Missoula. So we eat food and we break it up in our mouths and it goes into our digestive tract and it's broken down by bacteria. And that bacteria in our guts produces gas and that gas has to be released and it comes out our back end as a fart.

So what about dinosaurs' closest relatives, birds and reptiles? Well, in reptiles, farting is not common, but there are some species that do, like bearded dragons and green iguanas. However, birds don't have that gas-producing gut bacteria, and they digest food really, really fast, so no time for the gas to actually build up. And that means that birds don't fart.

We don't know about digestion time for dinosaurs. We do know that they ate stuff and it went through a digestive system and they pooped it out because we have all of those things. We have food in the gut preserved. We have coprolites, which are fossilized poop, preserved. So we have a lot of things, but we don't have gut bacteria, unfortunately, to know whether or not these animals had them. So it's possible that the group of feathered dinosaurs that birds are descended from

didn't fart. So because birds don't fart, if you're really, really closely related to a bird, maybe you didn't fart. But there's another group that probably did fart. And these are the sauropods. These are the long necked and long tailed large body dinosaurs like Brachiosaurus or Diplodocus.

And these were the largest land animals ever to live. So like Patagotitan, it weighed around 60 tons and was longer than a blue whale. So a blue whale today is like 90 feet long. And these dinosaurs were getting up over 120 feet long. That's a big animal. And...

It's estimated that they had to eat 1,400 pounds of food a day. And it was all plant material, which is really tough. It's hard to break down. And all of our modern herbivores today have gut bacteria that breaks down that hard to digest plant material. So these sauropods also probably had gut bacteria, which means...

They farted. They probably farted. And these would have been, just like their body size, these would have been massive farts. Um... Okay, so, let's be honest. I might have farted. But it was probably actually Elaine, the Apatosaurus, over there. Excuse me, Elaine. Ugh. Ugh.

On the bright side, now I know I'm not stress eating. I have to eat 1,400 pounds of food a day. Phew! I feel better. Which makes me just even more thankful for my short front legs. They're shorter than my back legs, which makes it super easy to eat mouthfuls of bushels and ferns.

And you know what's crazy? I don't chew. I can't. Instead, I have a pouch in my gullet that uses pebbles to grind my food. What a time saver. I just gotta get the occasional mouthful of pebbles, and down the hatch they go. Love being me.

If you like this episode, take a second to subscribe to Moment of Um wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to learn more about giant sauropods like me, check out the Brains On podcast where we have a whole episode all about the brontosaurus.

Oh, and want to see our shows come to life? Head to YouTube where we've got awesome animated Brains On episodes. Search Brains On Universe on YouTube and subscribe.

If you have a question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop the line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time, and the next day, and every single weekday. Until then... Elaine! Again, really? Get it, girl.