How very true....

[Tarbicus]

Sorry, you're right, I did. That said, though:

Tomasz Owerkowicz, a researcher at Harvard, has worked with living animals, both lizard and mammal, and shown that tiny blood vessels trapped in bone doesn't mean that an animal is warm-blooded, but that the animal is very active. He trained half his lab animals on tread mills everyday for months, while the other half sat around in their cages. Upon examining their bones he couldn't tell the cold-blooded ones apart from the warm-blooded ones. He could only tell the active ones from the couch potatoes....

....The new evidence that dinosaurs were cold-blooded comes from John Ruben, a physiologist with Oregon State University. He noticed that all warm-blooded animals alive now, both birds and mammals (including humans), have tiny, thin, curled structures behind their noses called turbinates. Cold-blooded animals don't have them. The purpose of these structures are to cool the warm air as it leaves the body during exhalation.

Since cool air holds less moisture than warm air this causes water to condense on the turbinates (just like droplets condense on the outside of a glass of ice water standing in the hot summer air). An inhalation of dry air causes the droplets on the turbinates to be reabsorbed and go back into the body. This saves the animal from losing precious water. This is especially important for warm-blooded animals because they breathe much more, and much warmer, air in and out than do cold-blooded animals.

Ruben has shown fossilized dinosaur skulls lack the boney ridges that turbinates would have attached to if dinosaurs would had had them. He can find them in fossilized mammals of the same period. http://unmuseum.mus.pa.us/colddino.htm

Beware trendy trends in science. :wink: