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by guardian on June 27th, 2009

guardian

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What evidence do we have that says that Triceratops (type) animals were not warm blooded or mammals. I know their are huge debates on their warm bloodedness, and as far as my research goes we have never found any triceratops(type) eggs.

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  • by iwnit on June 30th, 2009

    iwnit

    "The physiology of dinosaurs has historically been a controversial subject, particularly thermoregulation. Recently, many new lines of evidence have been brought to bear on dinosaur physiology generally, including not only metabolic systems and thermoregulation, but on respiratory and cardiovascular systems as well.

    During the early years of dinosaur paleontology, it was widely considered that they were sluggish, cumbersome, and sprawling cold-blooded lizards. However, with the discovery of much more complete skeletons in the western United States, starting in the 1870s, scientists could make more informed interpretations of dinosaur biology and physiology. Edward Drinker Cope, opponent of Othniel Charles Marsh in the Bone Wars, propounded at least some dinosaurs as active and agile, as seen in the painting of two fighting "Laelaps" produced under his direction by Charles R. Knight. In parallel, the development of Darwinian evolution, and the discoveries of Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus, led Thomas Henry Huxley to propose that dinosaurs were closely related to birds. Despite these considerations, the image of dinosaurs as large reptiles had taken root, and most aspects of their paleobiology were interpreted as being typically reptilian for the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1960's and with the advent of the Dinosaur Renaissance, views of dinosaurs and the physiology have changed dramatically, including the discovery of feathered dinosaurs in Early Cretaceous age deposits in China, indicating that birds evolved from highly agile maniraptoran dinosaurs."

    "Scientific opinion about the life-style, metabolism and temperature regulation of dinosaurs has varied over time since the discovery of dinosaurs in the mid-19th century. Scientists have broadly disagreed as to whether dinosaurs were capable of regulating their body temperatures at all. More recently, the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs (more specifically, active lifestyle and at least fairly constant temperature) has become the consensus view, and debate has focused on the mechanisms of temperature regulation and how similar dinosaurs' metabolic rate was to that of birds and mammals."

    "What the debate is about:
    "Warm-bloodedness" is a complex and rather ambiguous term, because it includes some or all of:
    - Homeothermy, i.e. maintaining a fairly constant body temperature. Modern endotherms maintain a variety of temperatures: 28 °C (82 °F) to 30 °C (86 °F) in monotremes and sloths; 33 °C (91 °F) to 36 °C (97 °F) in marsupials; 36 °C (97 °F) to 38 °C (100 °F) in most placentals; and around 41 °C (106 °F) in birds.[33]
    - Tachymetabolism, i.e. maintaining a high metabolic rate, particularly when at rest. This requires a fairly high and stable body temperature, since: biochemical processes run about half as fast if an animal's temperature drops by 10C°; most enzymes have an optimum operating temperature and their efficiency drops rapidly outside the preferred range.[56]
    - Endothermy, i.e. the ability to generate heat internally, for example by "burning" fat, rather than via behaviors such as basking or muscular activity. Although endothermy is in principle the most reliable way to maintain a fairly constant temperature, it is expensive, for example modern mammals need 10 to 13 times as much food as modern reptiles.

    Large dinosaurs may also have maintained their temperatures by inertial homeothermy, also known as "bulk homeothermy" or "mass homeothermy". In other words, the thermal capacity of such large animals was so high that that it would take two days or more for their temperatures to change significantly, and this would have smoothed out variations caused by daily temperature cycles."

    Here a summary of the evidence:
    "7 Metabolism
    7.1 What the debate is about
    7.2 Metabolic options
    7.3 Bone structure
    7.4 Growth rates
    7.5 Oxygen isotope ratios in bone
    7.6 Predator-prey ratios
    7.7 Posture and gait
    7.8 Feathers
    7.9 Polar dinosaurs
    7.10 Evidence for behavioral thermoregulation
    7.11 The crocodilian puzzle and early archosaur metabolism"
    Source and further information:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm-bloodedness_of_dinosaurs


    "No one knows how Triceratops reproduced or raised their young, except that they probably hatched from eggs."
    http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinos/Triceratops.shtml

    At least theropoda layed eggs:
    "Among the features linking theropods to birds are the three-toed foot, a furcula (wishbone), air-filled bones and (in some cases) feathers and brooding of the eggs."
    Source and further information:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theropoda

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