Big Dinos Stayed Cool

Discovery News ^ | Thursday, June 23, 2011 | Jennifer Viegas

[SunkenCiv]

Sauropod dinosaurs, the enormous plant-eating dinos with long tails and necks, had body temperatures ranging from 96.3 to 100.8 degrees Fahrenheit -- making them as warm as most mammals -- including people. Because body temperature usually rises the larger an animal gets, the findings, published in the latest issue of Science, suggest huge sauropods had mechanisms for cooling themselves off. "What we can say is that sauropods did not have body temperatures that were as cold as modern crocodiles and alligators," lead author Robert Eagle... many models had predicted that sauropods would have high body temperatures of over 104 degrees... "If you're an animal that you can approximate as a sphere of meat the size of a room, you can't be cold unless you're dead," explained co-author John Eiler...[They] and their colleagues made the determinations after studying 11 teeth belonging to Brachiosaurus brancai and Camarasaurus dinosaurs... measured concentrations of the rare isotopes carbon-13 and oxygen-18 in bioapatite, a mineral found in teeth and bone. How often these isotopes bond with each other depends on temperature, so the lower the temperature, the more carbon-13 and oxygen-18 clumps exist. Measuring these clumps revealed the temperature of the environment in which the mineral formed inside the dinosaur. This geochemical "thermometer" shows Brachiosaurus had a temperature of about 100.8 degrees, while Camarasaurus had a temperature of approximately 96.3 degrees.

[SunkenCiv]

THE GIST

• Plant-eating dinosaurs had body temperatures measuring 96.3 to 100.8 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Scientists were able to take the temperature of sauropods by measuring certain isotopes in dino teeth.
• Sauropods may have been gigantotherms, meaning they could have maintained warm temperatures by their sheer size.

[GeronL]

possibly warm blooded??

[SunkenCiv]

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[SERKIT]

In other words, as big, hot, and sweaty as Al Gore.

[Oztrich Boy]

Big Dinos Stayed Cool

Every kid knows that

[SunkenCiv]

Some say yes, some say no, some say some were and some weren’t.

[JoeProBono]

[GeronL]

interesting debate, so much is conjecture based on minimal evidence these days

[ClearCase_guy]

As long as you’ve got the theory right (and they’re very sure that they have the theory right) then the evidence is really just incidental.

[SunkenCiv]

That still doesn’t explain all those roasts.

[null and void]

No one pinged sauropod?

[SunkenCiv]

I figured the big rock got him.

[null and void]