A T. rex Tooth Reads About 36°C, Roughly an Elephant's Body Temperature
A team of geochemists at the University of California, Los Angeles, led by Randon J. Flores and Robert A. Eagle, measured the body temperature of T. rex by analysing its teeth. The dental thermometer came out at about 36° Celsius — roughly the body temperature of a modern elephant. The reading lands in an old argument: some studies have suggested many dinosaurs were endotherms, generating their own body heat like birds and mammals, rather than relying on their surroundings.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
There's a mismatch of scale here. One tooth gives you one animal's temperature, while the argument it weighs into is about whether many dinosaurs were endotherms at all.
True, but a reading that tracks an elephant rather than a lizard is a harder fact to argue with than a growth-rate curve. It just doesn't finish the argument on its own.