Dinosaurs May Have Been Warm-Blooded Like Birds and Mammals (VIDEO)

First Posted: May 28, 2015 02:55 PM EDT

Dinosaurs may not have been the cold-blooded creatures that many believe they were. Researchers have found that these animals may actually have been neither cold-blooded nor warm-blooded, but instead occupied a place in between the two categories.

"The study that I re-analyzed was remarkable for its breadth-the authors compiled an unprecedented dataset on growth and metabolism from studies of hundreds of living animals," said Michael D'Emic, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Upon re-analysis, it was apparent that dinosaurs weren't just somewhat like living mammals in their physiology-they fit right within our understanding of what it means to be a 'warm-blooded' mammal."

D'Emic specializes in bone microanatomy, which is the study of the structure of bone on scales that are just a fraction of the width of a human hair. Knowing generally how fast dinosaurs grew, he found that dinosaurs grew just as fast as mammals. In fact, dinosaurs were more like mammals than reptiles in terms of their growth and metabolism.

"Separating what we commonly think of as 'dinosaurs' from birds in a statistical analysis is generally inappropriate, because birds are dinosaurs-they're just the dinosaurs that haven't gone extinct," said D'Emic.

The new findings reveal that dinosaurs aren't the cold-blooded creatures we once thought. Instead, it's possible that they were warm-blooded or somewhere between warm- and cold-blooded. This heightens our understanding of dinosaurs and may spur new research into when, why and how pauses or slowdowns in growth are recorded in bones.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

Want to learn more? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.

How Bird Beaks Evolved from Dinosaur Snouts

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