Hot-Blooded or Cold-Blooded? Chemical Clues Solve One of the Oldest Mysteries in Paleontology
Paleontologists have been debating for decades whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, like modern mammals and birds, or cold-blooded, like modern reptiles. Knowing whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded could give us clues about how active they were and what their everyday lives were like, but previous methods to determine their warm- or cold-bloodedness — how quickly their metabolisms could turn oxygen into energy — were inconclusive. However, in a new paper published in the journal Nature, scientists are unveiling a novel method for studying dinosaurs' metabolic rates, using clues in their bones that indicated how much the individual animals breathed in their last hour of life.
"This is really exciting for us as paleontologists — the question of whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded is one of the oldest questions in paleontology, and now we think we have a consensus, that most dinosaurs were warm-blooded," says Jasmina Wiemann, the paper's lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
"The new proxy [...] allow us to directly infer metabolism in extinct organisms, something that we were only dreaming about just a few years ago. We also found different metabolic rates characterizing different groups, which was previously suggested based on other methods, but never directly tested," says Matteo Fabbri, [...] one of the study's authors.
Reference: "Fossil biomolecules reveal an avian metabolism in the ancestral dinosaur" by Jasmina Wiemann, Iris Menéndez, Jason M. Crawford, Matteo Fabbri, Jacques A. Gauthier, Pincelli M. Hull, Mark A. Norell and Derek E. G. Briggs, 25 May 2022, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04770-6
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2022, @02:16PM (3 children)
The perfect song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yDmeYxTeC0 [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2022, @06:10PM (2 children)
I ain't clicking on that until you tell me what it is. If it is some GD purple dinosaur and I click on it, I will reach through this internet and punch you in the throat. I'll even forgive a good rickroll, but not that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2022, @07:59PM
Foreigner, u can probably guess the song🌡
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Friday June 03 2022, @05:13AM
I was hoping for some Victorious Dinogods, left disappointed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AUP9KF2Aaw [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2022, @02:35PM
We just need one of these websites [mashable.com] for dinosaurs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Wednesday June 01 2022, @03:08PM (2 children)
"There are two big groups of dinosaurs, the saurischians and the ornithischians — lizard hips and bird hips. The bird-hipped dinosaurs, like Triceratops and Stegosaurus, had low metabolic rates comparable to those of cold-blooded modern animals. The lizard-hipped dinosaurs, including theropods and the sauropods — the two-legged, more bird-like predatory dinosaurs like Velociraptor and T. rex and the giant, long-necked herbivores like Brachiosaurus — were warm- or even hot-blooded."
So: both
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 01 2022, @05:17PM
What's interesting is that modern birds are warm blooded (not surprising to sustain flight) and modern lizards are cold blooded, while their dinosaur closest relatives (ancestors?) seem to be the reverse.
Of course there is hummingbird warm blooded and then there is sloth warm blooded.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2022, @08:20PM
That's what i was wondering about.