Paleontologists have been debating for decades whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, like modern mammals and birds, or cold-blooded, like modern reptiles. Knowing whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded could give us clues about how active they were and what their everyday lives were like, but previous methods to determine their warm- or cold-bloodedness — how quickly their metabolisms could turn oxygen into energy — were inconclusive. However, in a new paper published in the journal Nature, scientists are unveiling a novel method for studying dinosaurs’ metabolic rates, using clues in their bones that indicated how much the individual animals breathed in their last hour of life.
