14 DAY TRIAL // In June 2014, a team of scientists published a research paper saying that dinosaurs were neither warm-blooded nor cold-blooded creatures, but in-betweeners.
Paleontologist Michael D'Emic at Stony Brook University in New York, US, disagrees. He claim that these ancient beasts must have been warm-blooded creatures.
Otherwise, they would not have grown as fast as they did and would not have been able to sustain an active lifestyle, researcher Michael D'Emic goes on to say.
First things first, some clarifications are in order
Cold-blooded animals, dubbed ectotherms, are unable to regulate their own body temperature. What this means is that their body temperature fluctuates depending the temperature of their environment.
Warm-blooded creatures, known as endotherms, have the ability to control their body temperature and keep it at a constant level regardless of how hot or how cold outside conditions might be.
Just like warm-blooded animals, in-betweeners can regulate how cold or how hot their body gets at any given time. The difference is that they don't strive to maintain a constant body temperature and instead let it fluctuate.
Dinosaurs must have been warm-blooded creatures
As part of this investigation, Stony Brook University paleontologist Michael D'Emic studied fossilized dinosaur bones in an attempt to determine how fast dinosaurs grew and figure out how their metabolism worked.
In a study in the journal Science, the researcher explains that, having studied the growth patterns and metabolism of 21 distinct dinosaur species, he found that these beasts were warm-blooded.
They grew just as fast as run-of-the-mill mammals do these days, and their metabolism was not very different to that of warm-blooded animals still alive in this day and age, the Stony Brook University scientist adds.
“Dinosaurs weren’t just somewhat like living mammals in their physiology - they fit right within our understanding of what it means to be a ‘warm-blooded’ mammal,” Michael D'Emic said in a statement.
Besides, seeing how birds are basically dinosaurs that didn't go extinct and they are warm-blooded creatures, it makes sense to assume that their forefathers in ancient times were endotherms too.
“Separating what we commonly think of as ‘dinosaurs’ from birds in a statistical analysis is generally inappropriate, because birds are dinosaurs - they’re just the dinosaurs that haven’t gone extinct,” the paleontologist explained.
