It's Possible
Dinosaur's temperature
A dinosaur tooth is drilled in preparation for an analysis of the concentrations of isotopes in the tooth
For the longest time, most scientists believed it wasn't possible to accurately measure the body temperature of dinosaurs. They could only make educated guesses by, for example, calculating how fast the creatures ran based on the spacing of their tracks, or from measuring the growth rates of their bones. How warm (or cold) these long extinct creatures were remained an enduring mystery until now. Using a new approach, a team of researchers led by the California Institute of Technology (also known as Caltech) figured out how to take the body temperatures of dinosaurs by analyzing the concentration of certain isotopes preserved in the mineral bioapatite, found in teeth. The researchers studied two stable, but slightly heavier, isotopes of carbon and oxygen carbon-13 and oxygen-18. The isotopes tend to bond with each other, or "clump," at lower temperatures, and the lower the temperature, the more carbon-13 and oxygen-18 will clump. By analyzing the clumping of those isotopes, the researchers were able to determine fairly precise temperature values to within a range of 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 2 degrees Celsius). "The foundation of this measurement was an idea I had eight years ago to commission a mass spectrometer capable of analyzing simple gas molecules, including carbon dioxide, containing two or more rare isotopes," said lead study researcher John Eiler, a professor of geology and geochemistry at Caltech. "There were various excuses for doing so, but the real reason was that no one had ever seriously studied such things in natural samples ... so it was done purely out of desire to 'go' somewhere no one had gone in the study of naturally occurring isotopes."
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