What’s the News: Dinosaur metabolism is one of the biggest mysteries in paleontology. Ever since the giant creatures were first unearthed, scientists have been wondering whether dinosaurs drew their heat from the environment, like the cold-blooded modern reptiles they resemble, or whether they generated heat themselves, like warm-blooded mammals.

Using a geoscience technique to see at what temperature dinosaur tooth enamel formed, scientists have found that at least two large dinosaurs, Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus, had body temperatures similar to our own. While this study on its own doesn’t explain where the heat came from, it does add to paleontologists’ toolboxes a new, reliable way to probe temperature, which will lead to better inputs into the computational models that may eventually answer the question of whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded.

How the Heck:

The technique the scientists used revolves around the tendency of certain isotopes of carbon and oxygen to clump together when a mineral forms. These isotopes, carbon 13 and oxygen 18, bond to each other more when the temperature is cooler, a handy relationship that geophysicists have been using to study Earth’s past climate in the geological record.
In this paper, the team applied ...