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Originally Posted by renormalised
It will be interesting to see the results of this study...no doubt it will throw up some new questions and (possibly) answer some old ones. It wouldn't surprise me if the results from the study were either inconclusive or in conflict with other data found using different techniques.
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Carl, there are no other techniques for determining a dinosaurs' body temperature. In fact there is no other method to determine the temperature of formation of any carbonate (mineral or biogenic) without knowing some other data, which we generally don't. The temperature record derived from deep-sea cores assumes that the temperature of the deep ocean hasn't changed and isotopic composition of ocean water is also constant. This is valid for a few million years but no further. In other environments the assumption isn't even valid for a few years. For instance we cannot determine the temperature of formation of even Holocene soil carbonates because we do not know the isotopic composition of the soil water from which they precipitate. Even if we try to guess the isotopic composition of rainwater, it is then subject to an unknown amount of evaporative enrichment (water containing only the light isotopes evaporates faster than that containing heavy isotopes). This is why my boss calls it the fourth revolution in stable-isotope mass spectrometry, and why he jumped straight in!