Re: Mesozoic biomass

[J <sappororaptor@yahoo.com>]

Probably,

If the age of dinosaurs spanned more than 155 million years, and the current 
era only 65 million
years, you'd expect so. You said TOTAL biomass for the whole age range, right? 
- as opposed to
biomass  at any given time. 

I'd go out on a limb and speculate that a given environment would only be able 
to support a
certain upper limit of animal biomass, no matter how diverse and specious  that 
biomass is. 
I'd imagine that a desert would support the minimum animal biomass and 
something like a rainforest
or grassy plain the most animal biomass - as far as land is concerned. Also 
environments/ecosystems change, so here are some considerations for calculation 
of total biomass

- The proportion of land to sea (as marine biomass would be different to 
terrestrial biomass) over
the two ages. If the early Mesozoic was characterized by upercontinents, then 
i'd expect to see
more ocean:land ratio. I'd also guess that total marine biomass would be more 
stable to
terrestrial biomass over the ages.

- The average environment/ecosystem for that time period. This would concern 
terrestrail biomasses
more. Accepting that environments change, if there are more dry spells than 
not, this would impact

-Other factors such as extraterrestrial induced extinctions - or the frequency 
of it more exactly.
Also species genocide and environmental control (by humans)


Jay

--- "W. F. Zimmerman, wfzimmerman.com" <wfz@wfzimmerman.com> wrote:

> 
> I have been wondering whether anyone has estimated the total amount of
> available biomass at various points in the Mesozoic era. Was the total
> amount of animal biomass in the dinosaur era in excess of the animal biomass
> in modern times?  


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