A team of scientists hope they will be able to examine the long-term effects of climate change by looking back at dinosaurs.
According to Live Science, authors of a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said large dinosaurs avoided low-altitude tropical regions near the equator because they could not handle the severe climate swings.
"Our data suggest it was not a fun place," study co-author Randall Irmis, curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah and assistant professor at the University of Utah, said in a press release. "It was a time of climate extremes that went back and forth unpredictably and large, warm-blooded dinosaurian herbivores weren't able to exist nearer to the equator - there was not enough dependable plant food."
For their study, the researchers spent nine years studying rock deposits as old as 215 million years, the late Triassic Period and early in dinosaurs' existence. The deposits were unearthed at the "Ghost Ranch" in New Mexico.
"The conditions would have been something similar to the arid western United States today, although there would have been trees and smaller plants near streams and rivers and forests during humid times," study lead author Jessica Whiteside, lecturer at the University of Southampton, said in the release. "The fluctuating and harsh climate with widespread wild fires meant that only small two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs, such as Coelophysis, could survive."
Dinosaurs first appeared some 230 million years ago and evolved into a wide array of species relatively quickly. But sauropods, the largest of the large dinosaurs, always avoided tropic areas.
"For several decades, researchers have noticed a curious case - large plant-eating dinosaurs seemed to be much more common at high latitudes during the Triassic," Whiteside told Live Science. "However, it has only been in the past decade that we've realized they're completely missing from the tropics, where only a few small carnivorous dinosaurs dwelled."
