Dino discovery Sauropod dinosaurs, the enormous plant-eating dinos with long tails and necks, had body temperatures ranging from 36°C to 38°C – making them as warm as most mammals – including people.
Because body temperature usually rises the larger an animal gets, the findings published in Science, suggest huge sauropods had mechanisms for cooling themselves off.
“What we can say is that sauropods did not have body temperatures that were as cold as modern crocodiles and alligators,” says lead author Robert Eagle from the California Institute of Technology.
Eagle points out many models predicted that sauropods would have high body temperatures of over 40 C.
“This suggests that sauropods may have had cooling mechanisms to prevent very high body temperatures being reached due to their gigantic size,” Mr Eagle says.
So-called “gigantotherms” maintain warm temperatures due to sheer size. Plant-eating dinosaurs may have then been cold-blooded, in the sense that they could have depended on their environment for heat, as opposed to generating it internally, as warm-blooded species do.