#sauropod

Big chuds

Many dinosaurs (and birds) have way more efficient lungs, here is how they worked:

In humans, the air stops in your lungs between your inhale and exhale. After the gas exchange happens, there is no 'fresh' oxygenated in your system. However, in animals with special air sacks, the air passes through constantly, traveling in a loop.

Air would likely travel directly to the rear (blue) sac first, and the next exhalation will push it forward into the actual "lung" part in red. Spent air is then pulled into the front sacs (green) and exhaled. There are two breaths in motion at any time, and there is always oxygenated air in play. They can get away with this because gas exchange happens in the ducts the air travels through rather than needing to stop in the alveoli.

Due to this advantage, modern birds like an ostrich can maintain their highest speeds for up to half an hour (compared to the few seconds that mammals are getting) and dinosaurs that had this system were probably way better at running than older reconstructions gave them credit for. Sauropods in particular were enabled to be that big in part due to this system (also the diverticula/air sacs were lighter than other tissues helping with the weight problem), and birds can fly at higher altitudes because of better lung efficiently.

But how would one even know if a dinosaur was built like this, have you seen dinosaur lungs? Paleontologists can study the lungs based on the marks left where they attached to surrounding bones, since the vertebra had signs of forming a lung "ceiling" that lines up with modern birds. This kept the lungs stationary while the front and back sacs did the hard work, something that we mammals do not have the privilege of.

We still don't know how similar the bird and sauropod systems were tho. The current reconstructions are modeled after birds, but the dinosaurs could have been breathing way better than any living animal for all we know. However, I would still win in a fight because all the sauropods are now dead and no longer breathing.

Sources: https://svpow.com/2024/09/12/if-i-could-dissect-a-sauropod/

https://www.science.org/content/article/superlungs-gave-dinosaurs-energy-run-and-fight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuMHfWSyoGI

Amargasaurus (/əˌmɑːrɡəˈsɔːrəs/; "La Amarga lizard") is a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous epoch (130–120 mya) of what is now Argentina. The only known skeleton was discovered in 1984 and is virtually complete, including a fragmentary skull, making Amargasaurus one of the best-known sauropods of its epoch. Amargasaurus was first described in 1991 and contains a single known species, Amargasaurus cazaui. It was a large animal, but small for a sauropod, reaching 9 to 13 meters (30 to 43 feet) in length. Most distinctively, it sported two parallel rows of tall spines down its neck and back, taller than in any other known sauropod. Several studies postulated that, in life, the spines stuck out of the body as individual structures that supported a horn sheath. Analysis of the bone structure suggests that the spines were connected by ligaments and could have formed a scaffold supporting a neck sail. They might have been used for display, combat, or defense.