Hot-blooded T. rex and cold-blooded Stegosaurus: Chemical clues reveal dinosaur metabolism

[Still Waters]

For decades, paleontologists have debated 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 hints about how active they were and what their everyday lives were like, but the methods to determine their warm- or cold-bloodedness—how quickly their metabolisms could turn oxygen into energy—were inconclusive. But in a new paper in Nature, scientists are unveiling a new 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.

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-hot-blooded-rex-cold-blooded-stegosaurus-chemical.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04770-6