A recent study has shed light on the long-standing mystery regarding dinosaurs: These creatures had extremely high body temperatures, distinguishing them from their cold-blooded reptilian relatives. This characteristic limited the range of sizes that dinosaurs could achieve.
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(Image: cox.net) |
Scientists have spent many years exploring hypotheses about the body temperatures of dinosaurs. Some opinions suggest that dinosaurs were similar to reptiles, possessing cold body temperatures, while other theories propose that dinosaurs, like mammals and birds, had warm body temperatures.
Warm-blooded animals can adjust their body temperature to match their environment, whereas cold-blooded animals are significantly influenced by the surrounding temperature.
A recent hypothesis suggests that crocodiles, turtles, Indonesian lizards, and dinosaurs all had mechanisms to self-regulate their body temperature. Their body temperatures were typically several degrees higher than the ambient temperature.
This ability allowed them to generate and retain heat within their bodies through metabolic processes and movement. For large-bodied animals, their mass facilitates this process. For example, an elephant loses heat more slowly than a mouse.
Researchers have studied dinosaur growth patterns based on recent findings regarding their slowest and fastest growth rates throughout different periods, and then input this data into a computer model to estimate their body temperatures.
The results of this method indicated that there are about seven types of animals whose body temperatures rise with body size, and dinosaurs, being the largest, also operated under this mechanism.
A small dinosaur weighing approximately 12 kg would have a body temperature around 25 degrees Celsius, equivalent to the ambient temperature at that time, similar to most remaining reptile species. However, the largest dinosaur, estimated to weigh around 60 tons, had an average body temperature reaching up to 45 degrees Celsius, exceeding the allowable temperature for any animal’s body. This is precisely why dinosaurs could not continue to grow in size.
Adult dinosaurs were warmer-bodied when they were young. A dinosaur weighing 300 kg would have a body temperature approximately 3 degrees Celsius higher than that of an immature dinosaur.
