Dinosaur research goes far beyond digging up their bones and tracing their appearance. A science known as “ichnology” seeks precisely to find traces of ancient living beings and establish their behavior, methods of procreation, feeding and the like. And sometimes, that leads to some quaint discoveries: for example, the giant herbivore Brachiosaurus could kill you with the force of its own vomit.
Brachiosaurus, in case you don't remember, is one of the easiest dinosaurs to recognize: immense in size, a huge neck, reaching 12 meters in height (neck base to head); almost double that if we stretched it from head to tail. In the old movie Jurassic Park, he was one of the first to appear.
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The truly bizarre information was calculated in the book Dinosaurs Without Bones”, which introduces the reader to ichnology, detailing its research processes and discoveries. And inside the book, there is a diagram that shows the calculations that led to the deadly conclusion (for us and small dinosaurs, at least).
According to the calculation, which you can see in the diagram below, it considers that the brachiosaurus was capable of expelling 50 kg of vomit – something reasonable, considering the size of the animal and its diet (experts estimate the intake of almost 400 kg of plant matter per day) . If the material were expelled from the animal's mouth with the neck stretched out and the head pointed downwards, then we are talking about 13 m.
We don't need the numerical results to say for sure: that would be more than enough to kill any small or medium-sized dinosaur that was under the “gastronomic waterfall” – oh, yeah: and any human too.
In fact, the book postulates that the impact force of the material on the ground – presumably sandy, let's face it – would be enough to leave a small crater at the impact site.
The premise is reflected in the scientific unit because, according to the book, fossils of a small dinosaur – the work does not say which one – were found in a mini crater of this type. The context is not exactly explained as the situation is more positioned to calculate what happened, but it is not difficult (or even pleasant) to imagine a brachiosaurus expelling a shower of vomit over anything in its path.
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