WASHINGTON — Scientists have figured out a way to take the temperature of dinosaurs, and it turns out to be almost the same as ours.
Of course, you can’t just stick a thermometer under the tongue of a gigantic creature that has been extinct for millions of years. So they did the next best thing: They studied dinosaur teeth. Body temperature makes a difference in the amount of different types of carbon and oxygen that collect in the tooth enamel.
The scientists found that the long-necked brachiosaurus had a temperature of about 100.8 degrees Fahrenheit; the smaller camarasaurus had a temperature of about 98.3 degrees. People average 98.6.
Their study was reported online Thursday in the journal Science. It won’t settle the debate over whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded like modern mammals or cold-blooded, requiring outside sources of warmth to get them going like lizards.
“This doesn’t necessarily mean these large dinosaurs had high metabolism like mammals and birds,” said lead researcher Robert Eagle of the California Institute of Technology. “. . . They could have been ‘gigantotherms’ and stay warm because they were so large.”
