• Question: ARE DINOSUARS WARM BLOODED

    Asked by alfie11 to Ben, Dave, Ed, Sam, Susana on 23 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: David Briggs

      David Briggs answered on 23 Jun 2013:

      Great question!
      We don’t know for sure – at the moment I think that most palaeontologists believe that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, but this is currently a controversial topic – as we learn more and more about dinosaurs, we might find new evidence that suggests they are cold blooded.

    • Photo: Sam Horrell

      Sam Horrell answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Scientists assumes dinosaurs were cold blooded intially for a few reasons. Their large size and small brains suggests a slow metabolism (would take a lot of energy to maintain body temp). The fact that modern day lizzards are cold blooded also helped form that assumption.

      More recently it has been thaught that they may actually be warm blooded. Makings on their bones suggested a growth rate similar to modern warm blooded animals. Some dinosaurs have been found to have lived high up so it would have been to cold for cold blooded creatures to survive there. It is now widely believed that birds are descendants of dinosaurs and birds are warm blooded so people believe dinosaurs must have been too.

      Overall though we just aren’t sure, there are no dinosaurs around that we can perform tests on and we don’t know enough about metabolism to be certain from other evidence.

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