{"id":32517,"date":"2026-09-29T13:30:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T13:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=32517"},"modified":"2026-09-29T13:30:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T13:30:27","slug":"new-study-claims-t-rex-was-warm-blooded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=32517","title":{"rendered":"New Study Claims T. rex Was Warm-Blooded"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nWas the mighty T. rex a warm-blooded reptile?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the claim of a new study, published in Science Advances. This study analyzed three fossil T. rex teeth from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, comparing the results against an analysis of crocodile teeth from the same formation. A popular science article claims the results of the study \u201csettles the debate\u201d on the question of T. rex\u2019s internal temperature, placing it at 97 degrees Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n

The article states:<\/p>\n

This places T. rex\u2019s internal temperature ahead of today\u2019s cold-blooded reptiles and even sloths, but short of their avian descendents [birds], which range between 104 and 109 degrees Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n

(Notice right away the assumption of dinosaur-to-bird evolution!) But how does a tooth reveal a creature\u2019s internal temperature? Well, the article explains:<\/p>\n

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About 10 years ago, paleontologists developed a way to learn an extinct species\u2019 blood temperature by examining certain rare carbon\u2013oxygen bonds that form in fossilized bone. As [study coauthor] Eagle explained, tooth enamel offers the best medium for samples because its large crystalline composition remains extremely resilient to deterioration for millions of years.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n

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Using a dental drill, Eagle and his team extracted fossilized enamel that they then dissolved in phosphoric acid. This released carbon dioxide gas filled with the coveted isotopic bonds. From there, they employed a mass spectrometer to determine the chemical ratios after pressurizing the CO2. Subsequent analysis led them to conclude the T. rex\u2019s blood temperature was about 97 degrees Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n

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So does this really \u201csettle the debate\u201d? Was T. rex definitively a warm-blooded creature?<\/p>\n

Well, that kind of language is definitely overstating the case. The study authors write in the abstract, \u201cMeasurements of three T. rex teeth from the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation yield a temperature of 36.3 \u00b1 2.5\u00b0C.\u201d In other words, the study authors indirectly measured the body temperature, not the metabolic rate.<\/p>\n

I asked AiG\u2019s Joel Leineweber, a paleoartist and lifetime \u201cdinosaur nerd,\u201d his thoughts on this new study, and he shared with me these four problems with it:<\/p>\n

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    <\/p>\n
  1. You can\u2019t directly measure metabolism in something that\u2019s dead. So everything else is guesswork.<\/li>\n

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  2. They claim multiple lines of evidence in the paper, but so far all lines of evidence for warm-blooded dinosaurs that I\u2019ve seen rely on at least one of these two assumptions: a. environmental conditions (remember: the global Flood changes those) or b. phylogeny (in this case, assuming that dinosaurs evolved into warm-blooded birds). Both of these are totally different in a creation science model.<\/li>\n

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  3. The study itself is pretty cool, measuring the temperature of tooth formation in T. rex and fossil crocodiles and comparing the results (that part seems like good observational science). But there are some problems:<\/li>\n

    \n <\/ol>\n