Study: Wild Climate Swings Kept Vegan Dinosaurs Away From Tropics

It was highly unpredictable hot and dry climate linked with elevated levels of Carbon dioxide that prevented dinosaurs from inhabiting the tropics for more than 30 million years, according to a new study.

The study suggests that the climate in the tropics was punctuated by raging wildfires every few dozen years that reached temperatures of up to 600 degrees Celsius.

"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," said lead-author Jessica Whiteside from University of Southampton in Britain.

"The fluctuating and harsh climate with widespread wild fires meant that only small two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs, such as Coelophysis, could survive," Whiteside said.

Researchers took rock samples from a location called Ghost Ranch into account where number of Triassic dinosaur fossils have been discovered.

"When these rocks were deposited during the Late Triassic, northern New Mexico was very close to the equator at about 12 degree north in latitude -- around the same latitude as the southernmost tip of India sits today," co-author Sofie Lindstrom from Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, said.

The findings of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.