5 oct 2011
THE GIST
- Plant-eating dinosaurs had body temperatures measuring 96.3 to 100.8 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Scientists were able to take the temperature of sauropods by measuring certain isotopes in dino teeth.
- Sauropods may have been gigantotherms, meaning they could have maintained warm temperatures by their sheer size.
Because body temperature usually rises the larger an animal gets, the findings, published in the latest issue of Science, suggest huge sauropods had mechanisms for cooling themselves off.
"What we can say is that sauropods did not have body temperatures that were as cold as modern crocodiles and alligators," lead author Robert Eagle, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, told Discovery News.
Eagle pointed out that many models had predicted that sauropods would have high body temperatures of over 104 degrees.
"This suggests that sauropods may have had cooling mechanisms to prevent very high body temperatures being reached due to their gigantic size," he said.
