Page 40 - Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong
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Dinosaurs were cold− blooded
‘Cold-blooded’ animals need the warmth of the sun to heat them up before they can start moving around. Nearly all modern-day snakes and lizards are cold- blooded, which is why you might have seen them ‘basking’ on a rock to warm up.
‘Warm-blooded’ animals, like mammals and birds, use instant- access heat energy from inside their bodies without having to worry about warming up first. For years, people had thought dinosaurs were all cold-blooded, but what do new fossils tell us?
If dinosaurs were covered in feathers and fluff, as new fossils suggest, they would have been ‘insulated’, which means they would have easily kept the heat they had made inside their bodies. Warm-blooded animals today rely on their fur and feathers for exactly this reason.
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Being warm-blooded lets animals stay busy for longer periods of time, but they need to be able to get blood to all parts of the body quickly to fuel this amount of activity. And that’s exactly what the bones of dinosaurs show us they were able to do, by directing blood from their hearts around their bodies at very high pressure!
Warm-blooded animals grow much quicker than cold-blooded animals. By looking at bone growth rings (which are like the rings found inside a tree), palaeontologists have discovered that dinosaurs did in fact grow very quickly, and they used a lot of energy to do so!
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