For most of the last century T. rex was portrayed as a sluggish, tail-dragging reptile that needed to warm itself in the sun before it could go anywhere. Later, further research changed this view and replaced it with the active, bird-like animal shown in the film Jurassic Park. But whether T. rex Whether warm blood was used to power this activity remained a question. Now we may be closer to an answer.
A team of researchers led by Randon J. Flores and Robert A. Eagle, geochemists at the University of California, Los Angeles, measured the T. rex body temperature by analyzing his teeth. This dental thermometer reads around 36° Celsius – roughly the body temperature of a modern elephant.
Dental thermometry
Paleontologists have long argued about the physiology of dinosaurs based on indirect evidence such as bone microstructure, growth rates, and the appearance of fossils on the map. Some studies suggest that many dinosaurs were endothermic animals and generated their own body heat like birds and mammals. Others argued that each lineage may have had its own thermal strategy.
Previous measurement attempts T. rexThe temperature was based on oxygen isotopes in bones and teeth. The problem was that these ratios depend not only on the temperature, but also on the composition of the water present in the animal’s body, which no one could determine precisely for an extinct creature.
Flores, Eagle and their colleagues got around this using a technique called clumped isotope thermometry, which Eagle introduced to dinosaur research over a decade ago while working on Jurassic sauropods. Carbonate minerals in tooth enamel contain rare, heavy isotopes of carbon and oxygen (carbon-13 and oxygen-18). How often these heavy atoms combine or clump together depends on the temperature at which the mineral was formed. Because tooth enamel forms inside a living body, the number of these clumped bonds records the animal’s body temperature, regardless of the water content in its body.
