Scientists solve ancient dinosaur riddle that changes everything we know about T-Rex
dailystar.co.ukdinosaurs were cold-blooded or warm-blooded has finally been answered.Dinosaur experts, also known as paleontologists, have often wondered whether or not the most feared animals to ever live were warm or cold blooded, but they never had an answer.That is until now, thanks to a study created by a team lead by Dr Jasmina Wiemann of Yale University.It had been thought that dinosaur's were slow creatures because they were cold-blooded and had to conserve energy.But, Dr Wiemann explains in her new report, this was not the case and the answer lies in the beasts metabolism.She said: “Metabolism is how effectively we convert the oxygen that we breathe into chemical energy that fuels our body.“This is really exciting for us as paleontologists – the question of whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded is one of the oldest questions in paleontology, and now we think we have a consensus, that most dinosaurs were warm-blooded.“Having a high metabolic rate has generally been suggested as one of the key advantages when it comes to surviving mass extinctions and successfully radiating afterwards.“We are living in the sixth mass extinction, so it is important for us to understand how modern and extinct animals physiologically responded to previous climate change and environmental perturbations, so that the past can inform biodiversity conservation in the present and inform our future actions.”She did later clarify that while larger dinosaurs such as the T-Rex were warm-blooded, the smaller ones such as ancient lizards were probably still cold-blooded.Birds were also cold-blooded, which is, she adds, why they survived a mass extinction event – although that is not definitive because “many non-avian dinosaurs with equally high.
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