New twist in dinosaur debate

WASHINGTON-ST. LOUIS (US)—Recent evidence suggests many dinosaurs may have been “warm-blooded” like present-day mammals and birds rather than cold-blooded like lizards. If true, their internal furnace would have enabled them to live in colder habitats, such as high mountain ranges and the polar regions, allowing them to cover the entire Mesozoic landscape.

Findings were published Nov. 10 in the journal PLoS ONE.

Warm-blooded, or endothermic, dinosaurs also would have had the potential for athletic abilities rivaling those of birds and mammals, and possibly similar quick thinking and complicated behaviors as well.

These advantages would have come at a cost, however; endothermic animals require much more food than their cold-blooded, or ectothermic, counterparts because their rapid metabolisms fatally malfunction if they cool down too much, and so a constant supply of fuel is required.

An international team of researchers, including Herman Pontzer, assistant professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, used a combination of simple measurements, rigorous computer modeling techniques, and their knowledge of animal physiology for their investigation. They set out to determine whether a variety of dinosaurs and closely related extinct animals were endothermic or ectothermic, and when, where, and how often in the dinosaur family tree this important trait may have evolved.

“It’s exciting to apply our studies of living animals back to the fossil record to test different evolutionary scenarios,” Pontzer says. “I work on the evolution of human locomotion, using studies of living humans and other animals to figure out the gait and efficiency of our earliest fossil ancestors. When I realized this approach could be applied to the dinosaur record, I contacted John Hutchinson, an expert on dinosaur locomotion, and suggested we collaborate on this project.

“Our results provide strong evidence that many dinosaur species were probably warm-blooded,” he adds. “The debate on this issue will no doubt continue, but we hope our study will add a useful new line of evidence.”

Studies of present-day animals have shown that endothermic animals are able to sustain much higher rates of energy use than ectothermic animals can. Following this observation, the researchers reasoned that if the energy cost of walking and running could be estimated in dinosaurs, the results might show whether these extinct species were warm- or cold-blooded. If walking and running burned more energy than a cold-blooded physiology can supply, these dinosaurs were probably warm-blooded.

But metabolism and energy use are complex biological processes, and all that remains of extinct dinosaurs are their bones. So, the authors made use of a recent work by Pontzer showing that the energy cost of walking and running is strongly associated with leg length—so much so that hip height (the distance from the hip joint to the ground) can predict the observed cost of locomotion with 98 percent accuracy for a wide variety of land animals. As hip height can be simply estimated from the length of fossilized leg bones, Pontzer and colleagues were able to use this to obtain simple but reliable estimates of locomotor cost for dinosaurs.



First, how large would the forces required from the legs have to be to move the animal? In present-day animals, this is mainly determined by how much the animal weighs and what sort of leg posture it uses—straight-legged like a human or bent-legged like a bird, for example.

Second, how much muscle would be needed to supply these forces? Experiments in biological mechanics have shown that this depends mainly on the limb muscles’ mechanical advantage, which in turn depends strongly on the size of the bony levers they are attached to.




This early adoption of high metabolic rates may be one of the key factors in the massive evolutionary success that dinosaurs enjoyed during the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, and continue to enjoy now in feathery, flying form.

Their methods add to the many lines of evidence, from bone histology to lung ventilation and insulatory “protofeathers,” that are all beginning to support the fundamental conclusion that dinosaurs were generally endothermic. Ironically, indirect anatomical evidence for active locomotion in dinosaurs was originally some of the first evidence used by researchers John Ostrom and Robert Bakker in the 1960s to infer that dinosaurs were endothermic.

Pontzer and his colleagues provide a new perspective on dinosaur anatomy, linking limb design to energetics and metabolic strategies. The authors think the debate over dinosaur physiology will continue to evolve, and while the physiology of long-extinct species will always remain a bit speculative, they hope the methods developed in this study provide a new tool for researchers in the field.

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