Âé¶¹´«Ã½

Palaeontological pee

19 October 2002

GIANT plant-eating dinosaurs called sauropods peed enough to fill a bathtub.

Although there are many examples of fossil dinosaur dung, it wasn’t certain whether the creatures urinated, because their closest living relatives, birds, don’t produce liquid urine. Then Kata McCarville of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology examined a bathtub-sized pit among a set of fossilised dinosaur footprints in Colorado.

The pit looked as if it had been scoured by a stream of water from above. The fluid must have come from the dinosaurs themselves, McCarville told the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology last week.

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