Awesome Junior Artists:

Dinosaurs is a theme that has been approached in differing artistic ways by our junior students.

Room 8 and room 11 had heaps of fun and engaged in lots of learning. And just in case you think they may not be fully scientifically accurate in terms of colour, you may need to think again. The latest evidence - which I will share on our Green Page at a later date - is that dinosaurs started out as warm-blooded animals. Briefly, a Canadian scientist, Dr Wiemann, and her colleagues have pioneered a new method for directly measuring the metabolic rate of extinct animals. They analyzed over 50 extinct and modern vertebrates including mammals, lizards, birds and 11 different non-avian dinosaurs. Using laser microspectroscopy, they identified a specific molecular marker of metabolic stress in both the fossils and modern bones — one that directly correlates with how much oxygen the animal breathed. That, in turn, is a direct indicator of its metabolism. Higher metabolism meant warm blood, in the case of dinosaurs, warmer even than human blood. So... being warm-blooded, they may well also have been colourful, our juniors certainly think so.

PS:

Some dinosaurs were cold-blooded, but evidence indicates they evolved into becoming cold-blooded from originally being warm-blooded. This was more common for herbivorous dinosaurs.