"Jurassic World": Dinosaurs in the snow

Jurassic World Dominion, the sixth film in the series that began in 1993 with Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, hits theaters today.

A scene in the trailers for the new film might have caused a particular shake of the head among serious fans of primeval times: there is a living

, a huge herbivorous sauropod from the Diplodocidae family, instead of in a tropical swamp, alert as a fiddle in a snowy landscape.

Mustn't these animals have been cold-blooded in order to keep the energy requirements of their 20-ton bodies reasonably within limits?

Obviously not.

The week before last, dinosaur researchers were amazed at the research results of paleomolecular biologist Jasmina Wiemann, which she and her team had just published in

.

The German postdoc at the California Institute of Technology used infrared spectroscopy to measure biomarkers in the bones of more than fifty extant and extinct animals that provide information about the metabolic rate.

Wiemann's team confirmed the long-held assumption that dinosaurs like

were warm-blooded.

But their study also provides two tangible surprises: Warm-bloodedness must have developed in the common ancestors of dinosaurs and pterosaurs - but then some groups, including those of the iconic

, reverted to a cold-blooded metabolism, as is common in modern-day reptiles is.

Amazingly, however, the giant herbivores such as the Diplodocidae, for which one would actually expect the opposite, always remained distinctly warm-blooded.

Now this moment of harmony between research and film aesthetics was certainly a coincidence.

But Spielberg already knew that he couldn't take everything when it came to this topic.

After all, for many children, dinosaurs are their first contact with facts that are far removed from everyday life – that is, with basic research, so to speak.

In the new film, in which 33 different species of prehistoric creatures are to appear (in 1993 there were only seven), one is apparently more aware of this responsibility than ever before.

The prominent dinosaur researcher Stephen Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh was hired as a consultant for the film production and also ensured that with

a dinosaur with proper plumage finally appears.

Experts in the previous Jurassic Park films had particularly criticized the lack of consideration of the finding that many dinosaurs were feathered.

Then, however, the screenplay allows the Pyroraptor to dive under the ice cover of a frozen body of water.

Well, according to the new study, this group of animals was also warm-blooded.

Nevertheless, the text that the main actor has to speak at this moment is probably appropriate: "That can't be right."