Dinosaurs May Have Been Neither Warm-blooded Nor Cold-Blooded 54
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Soulskill
from the bbq-sauce-for-blood-like-americans dept.
from the bbq-sauce-for-blood-like-americans dept.
An anonymous reader writes An article published in Science (abstract) points to the possibility that dinosaurs were mesotherms more akin to modern Tuna. Their internal temperature would have been warmer than their surrounding environment, conferring on them the ability to move more quickly than any ectotherm ("cold blooded" animal), but wouldn't have been constant or as warm as any endoderm ("warm blooded" animal). Their energy use and thus their necessary food intake would have been greater than an ectotherm, but much less than an endotherm. In order to arrive at this possibility, bone growth rings in fossilized bone were used to establish growth rates and then compared to modern ectotherms and endotherms.
Re:Relation of birds to dinosaurs (Score:3, Insightful)
"Dinosaurs" werent just a single species. There were quite a lot of them. Some of them developed feathers and went on to become birds, some stayed in the water and went on to become Nessies, but most of them just plain died and their descendants didnt evolve into anything.