(Image source: California Institute of Technology)
BY STEVEN SPARKMAN
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Were dinosaurs warm-blooded or cold-blooded? And how could we tell without a time-travelling thermometer? Researchers at Caltech took up the challenge. One explains why the issue grabbed their attention.
“... they’re just intrinsically fascinating. They were titanic creatures that dominated the landscape. I think everyone would like to know what the Earth’s historical dragons and monsters actually were like -- How did they live? How did they behave? How did their bodies work? This has been one of the classic problems of paleobiology for over a century.”
Were dinosaurs fast and active, or slow and sedentary? When in Earth’s history did warm-bloodedness first evolve? To tackle these questions, CBS explains -- the researchers studied bulky sauropod dinos the way geochemists study rocks.
“The proof was found in shavings from ancient dinosaur teeth. Isotopes -- atoms of carbon and oxygen -- clump together in cold environments, but not as much when it’s warm. In the dinosaur teeth they studied, the Caltech team found little clumping of isotopes -- scientific proof the teeth developed inside warm bodies.”
The research shows that when the teeth developed, they were in a body that was roughly 100 degrees -- colder than modern birds, warmer than cold-blooded lizards, and pretty much equal to warm-blooded mammals. So is it case closed? A writer for io9 says, not so fast.
“Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy as all that. While this may seem to suggest warm-bloodedness, the larger the animal, the hotter it tends to be, thanks to the heat retaining properties of being a mountain made out of meat. While the results seem to be on the warm side, for an animal that large they're actually colder than many models predicted.”
But the question isn’t how warm the dinosaurs were, but whether they made their own heat. These results are right in the range where they don’t answer the question firmly either way. But one dino expert tells MSNBC the new technique -- taking temperatures from ancient teeth -- could eventually lead to a solid answer.
"If we were to find comparable temperatures in hatchlings of sauropods and juveniles of sauropods, that would definitely support the idea that these animals were endotherms [warm-blooded].”
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