Were dinosaurs warm-blooded like birds and mammals and not cold-blooded like reptiles as commonly believed?
Professor Roger Seymour of the University of Adelaide argues that cold-blooded dinosaurs would not have had the required muscular power to prey on other animals and dominate over mammals as they did throughout the Mesozoic period.
In his paper, Seymour asks how much muscular power could be produced by a crocodile-like dinosaur compared to a mammal-like dinosaur of the same size. Saltwater crocodiles reach over a ton in weight and, being about 50% muscle, have a reputation for being extremely powerful animals.
But drawing from blood and muscle lactate measurements he says was collected by collaborators at Monash University, University of California and Wildlife Management International in the Northern Territory (none of them are listed as co-authors so the details are unclear), Seymour says that a 200 kg crocodile can produce only about 14% of the muscular power of a mammal at peak exercise, and this fraction seems to decrease at larger body sizes.
"Much can be learned about dinosaurs from fossils but the question of whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded is still hotly debated among scientists," says Seymour. "Some point out that a large saltwater crocodile can achieve a body temperature above 30°C by basking in the sun, and it can maintain the high temperature overnight simply by being large and slow to change temperature.
"They say that large, cold-blooded dinosaurs could have done the same and enjoyed a warm body temperature without the need to generate the heat in their own cells through burning food energy like warm-blooded animals."
"The results further show that cold-blooded crocodiles lack not only the absolute power for exercise, but also the endurance, that are evident in warm-blooded mammals," says Professor Seymour.
"So, despite the impression that saltwater crocodiles are extremely powerful animals, a crocodile-like dinosaur could not compete well against a mammal-like dinosaur of the same size. Dinosaurs dominated over mammals in terrestrial ecosystems throughout the Mesozoic. To do that they must have had more muscular power and greater endurance than a crocodile-like physiology would have allowed."
Earlier work he did on blood flow to leg bones concluded that the dinosaurs were possibly even more active than mammals.
Citation: Seymour RS (2013) Maximal Aerobic and Anaerobic Power Generation in Large Crocodiles versus Mammals: Implications for Dinosaur Gigantothermy. PLoS ONE 8(7): e69361. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069361
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