I think the argument has been mostly settled in favor of the "lukewarm-blooded" theory, but it'd still be interesting to see if anyone has any dissenting opinions.
I think the argument has been mostly settled in favor of the "lukewarm-blooded" theory, but it'd still be interesting to see if anyone has any dissenting opinions.
Yeah but there are plenty of big archosaurs that are ectothermic. Not that any of them approach the size of a ceratopsian, but the proof of concept is there. Look at some alligators in the U.S., they make it through occasionally-freezing winters.
If they can be ectothermic, I feel like something 3x their size could still get by on being mesothermic.
Yeah but late cretaceous arctic winters got colder than winters in the range of alligators. There's no gators in Montana today and a polar cretaceous winter would have been similarly cold. The same arctic site that I'm thinking of re:ceratopsians specifically turned up zero remains of reptiles or amphibians despite them having sieved and sorted all microfossils
For real? I don't know much about cretacious climates but I thought the era was generally warmer than the quaternary. Like no-ice-at-the-poles warm. Happy to be wrong about this, that was just my impression.
no permanent ice at the poles, correct; but sea ice in winter wasn't out of the question IMO. It was a lot warmer but that still meant a cool-temperate continental climate like, say, continental eastern europe or the northern Rockies
Hmm... Ok. Idk. The thing that put me in the lukewarm-blood camp was a paper I read about dinosaur growth rates (specifically therapods and sauropods, I think?). The argument was they grew in a way that was too seasonally-dependant to be warm-blooded, but too quickly to be truly cold-blooded. Or something along those lines.
in the final calculation the important thing is that dinosaurs are neat
The neatest!