Scientific Illustration

rhamphotheca:

How to Take a Dinosaur’s Temperature

by Marlene Cimons

For the longest time, most scientists believed it wasn’t possible to accurately measure the body temperature of dinosaurs. They could only make educated guesses by, for example, calculating how fast the creatures ran based on the spacing of their tracks, or from measuring the growth rates of their bones.

How warm (or cold) these long extinct creatures were remained an enduring mystery — until now. Using a new approach, a team of researchers led by the California Institute of Technology (also known as Caltech) figured out how to take the body temperatures of dinosaurs by analyzing the concentration of certain isotopes preserved in the mineral bioapatite, found in teeth.

The researchers studied two stable, but slightly heavier, isotopes of carbon and oxygen — carbon-13 and oxygen-18. The isotopes tend to bond with each other, or “clump,” at lower temperatures, and the lower the temperature, the more carbon-13 and oxygen-18 will clump. By analyzing the clumping of those isotopes, the researchers were able to determine fairly precise temperature values — to within a range of 2 to 4 deg F (1 to 2 deg C)…

(read more: Live Science)     (image: Russel Hawley, Tate Geological Museum)