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Dinosaurs Are People Too!
By nikkita | November 12, 2009
There’s a lot to be said about dinosaurs and how awesome they were, but now it looks like they possibly could have been warm blooded too. Say whhhhaaaaattttt?
Now, using a biomechanical model that predicts the energy cost of walking and running based on the size of an animal’s leg bones, researchers have shown that the biggest dinos couldn’t have gotten around without a warm-blooded metabolism.
“Using studies of living animals, we can figure out the relationship between limb design and the amount of muscle an animal needs to support its body weight as it walks and runs,” said anthropologist Herman Pontzer of Washington University in St. Louis, who co-authored the paper published Thursday in PLoS ONE. “The size of muscle is very good predictor of how much energy you need, because to turn on muscle, you need oxygen.”
Because warm-blooded animals have much greater aerobic capacity than their cold-blooded counterparts, finding bigger muscles and higher energy demands in dinosaurs would favor the warm-blooded hypothesis. Indeed, when Pontzer and colleagues looked at anatomical models of 14 different species of extinct dinosaurs, they were surprised to find that even at a slow walk, most dinos needed more energy than a cold-blooded metabolism could provide.
I fully support this theory based on the assumption alone of how much energy dinosaurs would need to carry around all of that super awesomage. According to science, that stuff is pretty heavy.
Read more about our hot blooded prehistoric ancestors here!
Thanks, Marvin!
Topics: Fierce, science | No Comments »
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