Hot or not: Were dinosaurs warm-blooded?
Science
Hot or not: Were dinosaurs warm-blooded?
A new method to chemically analyze dinosaur eggshells has allowed scientists to gauge the extinct lizards’ body temperature, researchers said on Tuesday. The findings support recent work by other teams that dinosaurs were neither warm- nor cold-blooded, but somewhere in between, researchers wrote in the journal Nature Communications. But it also indicated that body temperatures differed between dinosaur species.
The temperatures we measured suggest that at least some dinosaurs were not fully endotherms [warm-blooded] like modern birds. They may have been intermediate — somewhere between modern alligators and crocodiles and modern birds.
Robert Eagle of UCLA, the study’s lead author
Scientists have been debating for 150 years whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded hunters, like mammals, or cold-blooded and sluggish, like many reptiles. The team said it used a pioneering procedure to measure the internal temperature of dinosaur mothers which lived some 71-80 million years ago. They examined the chemical makeup of the shells of 19 fossilized eggs from two types of dinosaurs, unearthed in Argentina and Mongolia’s Gobi desert.
If dinosaurs were at least endothermic [warm-blooded] to a degree, they had more capacity to run around searching for food than an alligator would.
Robert Eagle
