[Kodos]

Originally Posted by flere-imsaho

OK, someone help me on this. The Jurassic World trailer is filled with scenes of dinosaurs in the snow. They were cold-blooded, right? Am I crazy?

I think the scientific community now believes that, like birds, dinosaurs were warm blooded.

https://earth.yale.edu/news/were-din...shells-say-yes

“Dinosaurs sit at an evolutionary point between birds, which are warm-blooded, and reptiles, which are cold-blooded. Our results suggest that all major groups of dinosaurs had warmer body temperatures than their environment,” said Robin Dawson, who conducted the research while she was a doctoral student in geology and geophysics at Yale.

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The testing process is called clumped isotope paleothermometry. It is based on the fact that the ordering of oxygen and carbon atoms in a fossil eggshell are determined by temperature. Once you know the ordering of those atoms, the researchers said, you can calculate the mother dinosaur’s internal body temperature.

For example, eggshells of a Troodon, a small, meat-eating theropod, tested at 38 degrees, 27 degrees, and 28 degrees Celsius (or 100.4, 80.6, and 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Eggshells from the large, duck-billed dinosaur Maiasaura yielded a temperature of 44 degrees Celsius (111.2 degrees Fahrenheit). Both the Troodon and Maiasaura eggshells were from Alberta, Canada. Meanwhile, fossilized dinosaur eggs from the oospecies (a species classification limited to dinosaur eggs)Megaloolithus, from Romania, tested at 36 degrees Celsius (96.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

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“What we found indicates that the ability to metabolically raise their temperatures above the environment was an early, evolved trait for dinosaurs,” Dawson said.