Who Would Win In A Fight, A Cold-Blooded Dinosaur Or A Warm-Blooded One?

Monday, July 22, 2013 - 08:30 in Paleontology & Archaeology

Cold-Blooded A Crocodylus porosus or saltwater crocodile, the species of crocodile in which scientist Roger Seymour performed his metabolism studies. Laubarr on Wikimedia Commons One scientist hits upon a creative way to argue that dinosaurs were endothermic. Were dinosaurs "cold-blooded" or "warm-blooded"? Paleontologists still aren't sure. Now, one environmental scientist has painstakingly gathered the data to answer a related question: Given they were the same size, who would win in a fight, a cold-blooded dino or a warm-blooded one? A warm-blooded dinosaur would have definitely won, according to a series of fascinating experiments University of Adelaide scientist Roger Seymour conducted. Dinosaurs were therefore probably warm-blooded, Seymour wrote in a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE. They would have needed the power advantage of warm-bloodedness to compete as successfully as they did with mammals in Mesozoic times. Before we go on, let's just define warm-bloodedness and cold-bloodedness. Warm-blooded-or, scientifically speaking, endothermic-animals use sophisticated bodily...

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net