5 ms·
T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97°F
gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/science/trex-dinosaur-temperature-warm-blooded.html?unlocked_article_code=1.B1E.-_cw.27sz2ArILpnl&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/science/trex-dinosaur-tem...
paper:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb7653 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb7653
- juancn 17d agoWow! Close to boiling! /s
- deleted 18d ago[deleted]
- mepian 17d agoI read the headline in Celsius and thought that they were a bit too hot.
- unsnap_biceps 17d agoWould add a new fun dimension to Jurassic Park. "Quick! Climb to 300 meters above sea level and the trex will boil and we will be safe!"
- bel8 17d agoto make it even more egregious: "Quick! Climb to about 1000 feet above sea level and the trex will boil and we will be safe!"
- dmoy 17d agoI know you were talking about a mountain or something, but "climb to <altitude>" does make one think about this exchange which would be in feet, not meters: "climb to FL20 and the flying dinosaur thing will break" could work though Since, annoyingly, international altitudes are done in increments of 1000 feet (ish, handwaving)
- micromacrofoot 17d ago> Up until the early 2000s, dinosaurs were thought to be rather reptilian and therefore probably coldblooded, Dr. Wiemann said. That began to change as multiple lines of evidence from geochemistry studies and CT scans of fossils showed they were warm-blooded. Dr. Wiemann had previously found that T. rex had a fast metabolism, but she said the new study did an “exquisite” job of zeroing in on a precise body temperature. > To take the body temperature of a long extinct, school-bus-size predator, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, used a clever geochemistry technique on fossilized teeth, including two from “Thomas,” a famous T. rex in the collection of the National History Museum of Los Angeles County. fascinating we've also learned more about the air at the time via teeth, https://nautil.us/the-data-in-a-dinos-smile-1229729 https://nautil.us/the-data-in-a-dinos-smile-1229729
- SoftTalker 17d agoIt intuitively makes sense. A cold-blooded creature of that mass would take a long time to properly warm up or cool down. Most modern cold-blooded animals are small, e.g. frogs, snakes, lizards. They can move into the sunlight or shade as needed and pretty quickly change temperature.
- lioeters 17d agoFrom the paper, that is: 36.3 ± 2.5°C.
- orbital-decay 17d agoThanks, I thought it was almost boiling.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- gibspaulding 17d agoSo 97.3 ± 4.5 °F for anyone else curious how the precision translates.
- Galilyou 17d agoPhew! Thank you! I feel for the ungodly fahrenheit again
- nmoon 17d agoFahrenheit is the superior measure
- WarmWash 17d agoBetter for day to day life, worse for science and engineering.
- msm_ 17d agoIs it really better for day to day life? I am certain that it only appears so because you're used to it. I think for day to day life they're both roughly equivalent. Of course, for me Celsius is more natural and intuitive, but again - that's because I'm used to it.
- 17d ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 17d agoWouldn't be surprised if the smaller raptors had even higher body temps.
- layer8 17d agoSeems sensible, given that birds have higher body temperatures.
- hedgehog 17d agoI didn't know this so I looked up the number for farm chickens, according to University of Kentucky (seems appropriate) they have a body temperature of "between 105°F and 107°F (40.6° and 41.7°C) ... Smaller chicken breeds have a higher body temperature than larger breeds" https://afs.mgcafe.uky.edu/poultry/chapter-7-air-temperature https://afs.mgcafe.uky.edu/poultry/chapter-7-air-temperature
- Obscurity4340 17d agoI wish raptors could be reanimated and made in miniature so you could have little Raptor domestici (house raptors) running around causing all kinds of hijinks
- ChrisMarshallNY 17d agoI think many of them were about the size of turkeys. Velociraptor was quite small. Jurassic Park used Utahraptor, or Deinonychus as a model.
- manarth 15d agoThe cassowary is here and alive today, but you wouldn't want of them in your backyard!
- john_strinlai 17d agoi know its the nytimes, so we can assume american units, but i find it sort of crazy that even throughout the body of the article it doesnt ever say "fahrenheit".
- BugsJustFindMe 17d agoIt doesn't need to. Any other unit would be either insanely cold or insanely hot.
- skrebbel 17d agoGiven that it’s a shouty headline in a major publication, that’s what I would have expected.
- bthrn 17d agoCommon sense suggests that living creatures are likely not boiling when they have a mild fever.
- john_strinlai 17d agoi am not a paleontologist and there have been many extremely weird living creatures over the time earth has been around. and as the sibling comment mentions, i am primed for science articles to be metric.
- falserum 17d agoI’m metric all the way, but if it would use metric, it still should unambiguously state: C
- john_strinlai 17d agoindeed! my "common sense" is to always state the units you're working with, no matter how obvious you think it is. at least, that was the concept was drilled into me throughout all my schooling. perhaps that has changed in the last few decades.
- ohyoutravel 17d agoThis is really interesting, worth a read. Wouldn’t be surprised if the even larger dinosaurs had even higher body temps!
- laweijfmvo 17d agoHow do we know its body temperature was 97 degrees, and simply not the environment was 97 degrees?
- pixl97 17d agoWhat environment would stay at a constant 97 degrees?
- surgi 17d agoEurope this summer? /jk
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- cwmma 17d agoIf it was environmental then you'd expect it to fluctuate over time, but they also checked it against an animal they knew to be cold blooded, if it was environmental you'd expect them to be the same, but that animal was calculated by the same method to be colder.
- altcognito 17d agoThey compared against crocodilian teeth and those teeth were at a different temperature. Crocodilian teeth are known to be at a similar temperature to their environment because they are known to be cold blooded. It is correct to say that we don't know they were warm blooded, just that their body temps were likely the given observed temperature.
- laweijfmvo 15d agoi assume this means crocodiles from the same time period?
- b0rtb0rt 17d agowe don’t, all of this dinosaur stuff is bullshit
- globular-toast 17d agoFarenheit. So a little bit cooler than us.
- moomoo11 17d agoi will now believe this information until it becomes outdated in the future, at which point i will believe that information until it becomes outdated later
- mindcandy 17d agoGreat! That's how knowledge is supposed to work.
- partyficial 17d agothat's not knowledge - that's just theory and belief. you know, like religion.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- SAI_Peregrinus 17d agoNo, religion requires faith. Faith is belief without or in direct contradiction of evidence.
- happytoexplain 17d agoThe word for what you're thinking of is "faith". Theory and belief are the constituents of all consciousness. Young engineers sometimes fall into this trap - that there is absolute truth, and everything else. It would be nice if true, but it's wildly out of line with reality. "Believing" something is not the same as having a dogmatic faith in something. We (ideally) change our beliefs with every new piece of input. That's good.
- partyficial 17d ago> We (ideally) change our beliefs with every new piece of input. That's good. sounds like a cope. like shifting goalposts. or no true scotsman fallacy. if I see a tree in front of me, and 2 seconds later I close my eyes, and someone asks me if there is a tree in front of me, should I say yes because I "know" it, or because I "believe" it ? In that 2 seconds, the tree could have fallen down. So if i said "yes", I wouldn't be lying but I would be incorrect. Therefore all "knowledge" is belief about some past "truth". Whether you call it faith, evidence-based, dogma etc. they all do fall under the same bucket if you think deeply about it.
- strongwaddle 17d ago'Hotter than a crocodile, cooler than a chickennnnn....' is the opening line to a great song i'll never get to hear.
- dpe82 17d agoThe slop generator's gotchu: https://suno.com/s/gT2YhaQyNdlkzgeU https://suno.com/s/gT2YhaQyNdlkzgeU
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- p1mrx 17d agoWith the power of AI slop, you can hear anything: https://pmarks.net/posted_links/trex_ai.mp3 https://pmarks.net/posted_links/trex_ai.mp3
- vardump 17d agoCan you share the prompt?
- p1mrx 17d agoClaude Sonnet 5 on openrouter.ai/chat > Write a song about the T-rex. First line "Hotter than a crocodile, cooler than a chicken". Format for aisonggenerator.io. Then I copied the output to aisonggenerator.io (1 free song per day), and used Audacity/Tenacity to record the MP3 because they make you pay to download.
- vardump 17d agoThanks!
- em-bee 17d agowaiting for the video by neural derp like this one: https://youtu.be/lS6dtRWXF1o https://youtu.be/lS6dtRWXF1o
- modzu 17d agoid assumed as much since seeing jurassic park in 1996
- isomorphic 17d agohttps://archive.is/20260916181240/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/science/trex-dinosaur-temperature-warm-blooded.html https://archive.is/20260916181240/https://www.nytimes.com/20... (Even the NY Times gift link requires a login.)
- cr1895 17d agoI wonder if that's triggered if NYT determines that a gift link is being widely used?
- code_biologist 17d agoRepost from a different thread: Related only topically, a 1hr YouTube talk I enjoyed a lot: "Hatchling T. rex and the Evolution of Vertebrate Parental Care" by Nick Longrich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd0dR2n9hLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd0dR2n9hLA He's a paleontologist and the talk starts with some pretty interesting statistical analysis aiming to estimate T rex clutch sizes (66 eggs) and hatchling weights (1.5kg) as well as T rex parental care. It ends with looking at evolutionary history trends in increasing parental investment in radically different animals. He talks a little slow, so a little playback speed bump won't go amiss.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- verelo 17d agoPlease add the measurement system to the title. The times should know better...
- cr1895 17d agoThough it should be pretty obvious from this context that it's not 97 Celsius or Kelvin.
- verelo 17d agoSure, but 'F' is a lot shorter than "whichever unit doesn't kill the dinosaur."
- articulatepang 17d agoWeird, my browser somehow doesn’t render the title as “T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97 Degrees whichever unit doesn’t kill the dinosaur”. It just leaves that last part out, making it even shorter than “F”.
- verelo 17d ago"T. rex was warm" is even shorter again. I think we’ve established that omitting information saves space.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- ray_v 17d agoUnless the Earth was a __VERY__ different place
- t-writescode 17d agoThe Times is a US magazine. The odds of them picking a US unit of measurement are very high.
- ButlerianJihad 17d agoI can testify that my baseline body temperature (measured sublingually) is 97.6℉ By the way, Google Fit's body-temperature entry is cool, but when it comes to "Location", why is "mouth" in the middle of the list and next to some other, unrelated parts? How is the list being sorted?
- SP3269 17d agoI’m missing Marc Bolan.
- fsckboy 17d agois it you, metal guru?
- b0rtb0rt 17d agothe best part of this kind of science is that there’s no way to reproduce it or prove if it’s actually true, but it makes a great pop science article