Now for something completely different

We'd like to see you report this in Hoard's Dairyman. That was the challenge presented by acquaintances at the Cornell Nutrition Conference. Believe it or not, the presentation in question was about dinosaurs. And, to our skeptical friends from the conference, here's our report.

Tucked in between papers on transition cows and the amino acid needs of chickens was a presentation by the colorful Cornell animal scientist P. J. Van Soest. One of animal science's most brilliant minds, Van Soest is best known for discovering the acid-detergent/neutral detergent system of analyzing fiber levels. His method has had incalculable impact on how we feed dairy cattle and other ruminants. And, perhaps, we should include any animal whose digestive tract contains some fermentation at some point.

Combine unequalled knowledge of fiber digestion and fermentation with a wealth of creative thinking and it is not difficult to envision how Van Soest got into paleozoology and why the discipline came to him. In fact, Van Soest's presentation at the nutrition conference was a brief report of a symposium on Sauropods held in Bonn, Germany, to which he was invited.

Sauropods were herbivorous dinosaurs that lived about 140 to 210 million years ago. They are the largest animals that ever existed. They were about 120 feet long head to tail, weighed nearly 100 tons, and had footprints that measured 2 to 2-1/2 feet in length.

What dinosaurs ate and how they digested it are among the topics discussed when these scientists meet. The dinosaurs were not ruminants, but they likely had hind gut fermentation that helped digest the conifers, cycads, ferns, gingko, and horsetails that existed then. Today's grasses and legumes did not exist. They are only 30 million years old. The herbivorous dinosaurs may have swallowed stones to develop a gastric mill (gizzard) to reduce particle size and speed up forage rate of passage. Scientists speculate about Sauropods' blood pressure and whether they were able to graze on treetops or whether their diet consisted mostly of shorter plants.

Other points of interest from Van Soest's talk: Dinosaurs were warm-blooded, today's birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than any other animal, and there was no such thing as a Brontosaurus which appear in much dinosaur literature and which became a symbol of the Sinclair Oil Company. A paleontologist put the head of one dinosaur on the body of another which "created" a dinosaur that never existed. 

We told you this was going to be different.