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mrpg writes:

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).

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