I know you were talking about a mountain or something, but "climb to <altitude>" does make one think about this exchange which would be in feet, not meters:
"climb to FL20 and the flying dinosaur thing will break" could work though
Since, annoyingly, international altitudes are done in increments of 1000 feet (ish, handwaving)
> Up until the early 2000s, dinosaurs were thought to be rather reptilian and therefore probably coldblooded, Dr. Wiemann said. That began to change as multiple lines of evidence from geochemistry studies and CT scans of fossils showed they were warm-blooded. Dr. Wiemann had previously found that T. rex had a fast metabolism, but she said the new study did an “exquisite” job of zeroing in on a precise body temperature.
> To take the body temperature of a long extinct, school-bus-size predator, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, used a clever geochemistry technique on fossilized teeth, including two from “Thomas,” a famous T. rex in the collection of the National History Museum of Los Angeles County.
It intuitively makes sense. A cold-blooded creature of that mass would take a long time to properly warm up or cool down. Most modern cold-blooded animals are small, e.g. frogs, snakes, lizards. They can move into the sunlight or shade as needed and pretty quickly change temperature.
I quite like Fahrenheit. The 0 to 100F (-17 to 37C) range perfectly encapsulates the range of outdoor temperatures I expect to encounter during the year.
I wish raptors could be reanimated and made in miniature so you could have little Raptor domestici (house raptors) running around causing all kinds of hijinks
i know its the nytimes, so we can assume american units, but i find it sort of crazy that even throughout the body of the article it doesnt ever say "fahrenheit".
They compared against crocodilian teeth and those teeth were at a different temperature. Crocodilian teeth are known to be at a similar temperature to their environment because they are known to be cold blooded.
It is correct to say that we don't know they were warm blooded, just that their body temps were likely the given observed temperature.
i will now believe this information until it becomes outdated in the future, at which point i will believe that information until it becomes outdated later
> Write a song about the T-rex. First line "Hotter than a crocodile, cooler than a chicken". Format for aisonggenerator.io.
Then I copied the output to aisonggenerator.io (1 free song per day), and used Audacity/Tenacity to record the MP3 because they make you pay to download.
Repost from a different thread: Related only topically, a 1hr YouTube talk I enjoyed a lot: "Hatchling T. rex and the Evolution of Vertebrate Parental Care" by Nick Longrich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd0dR2n9hLA
He's a paleontologist and the talk starts with some pretty interesting statistical analysis aiming to estimate T rex clutch sizes (66 eggs) and hatchling weights (1.5kg) as well as T rex parental care. It ends with looking at evolutionary history trends in increasing parental investment in radically different animals.
He talks a little slow, so a little playback speed bump won't go amiss.
The same newspaper uses Celsius in its climate reporting, including the article below. Apparently the units depend on which extinction we’re discussing. One extra letter would save the guesswork.
This makes sense from a context and writer perspective.
Most conversation about climate change has been around global average temps raising in C. Further, switching that back and forth and doubling it for F would be seen as manipulative by people that don’t want to hear it.
On the contrary, the Times’s US audience (probably their main audience) thinks of body temp, which this is, in F.
To add further, the audience and writers that want to share cool, new dinosaur fact and the group that does an update on global warming are different people and operate and think differently around these specific things in these specific contexts.
Of course it would be easier to add the letter, but I can definitely see why it wasn’t included.
That’s a reasonable explanation for choosing Fahrenheit. It’s also a pretty good explanation for choosing to label it, since the same paper uses both scales.
It seems that this headline is following the guidelines of the times style guide: "In general, ordinary references to temperature do not specify the scale."
Well it’s definitely not 97 K, it’s definitely not 97 C, so it’s probably 97 F which would put it in the same general ballpark as nearly all terrestrial vertebrates.
I can testify that my baseline body temperature (measured sublingually) is 97.6℉
By the way, Google Fit's body-temperature entry is cool, but when it comes to "Location", why is "mouth" in the middle of the list and next to some other, unrelated parts? How is the list being sorted?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 75.8 ms ] threadpaper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb7653
"Quick! Climb to 300 meters above sea level and the trex will boil and we will be safe!"
"Quick! Climb to about 1000 feet above sea level and the trex will boil and we will be safe!"
"climb to FL20 and the flying dinosaur thing will break" could work though
Since, annoyingly, international altitudes are done in increments of 1000 feet (ish, handwaving)
> To take the body temperature of a long extinct, school-bus-size predator, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, used a clever geochemistry technique on fossilized teeth, including two from “Thomas,” a famous T. rex in the collection of the National History Museum of Los Angeles County.
fascinating
we've also learned more about the air at the time via teeth, https://nautil.us/the-data-in-a-dinos-smile-1229729
Velociraptor was quite small. Jurassic Park used Utahraptor, or Deinonychus as a model.
It is correct to say that we don't know they were warm blooded, just that their body temps were likely the given observed temperature.
is the opening line to a great song i'll never get to hear.
> Write a song about the T-rex. First line "Hotter than a crocodile, cooler than a chicken". Format for aisonggenerator.io.
Then I copied the output to aisonggenerator.io (1 free song per day), and used Audacity/Tenacity to record the MP3 because they make you pay to download.
Internet says the inspiration for Alan Grant is Robert Bakker, and his first writings on it were in 1968:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_T._Bakker
(Even the NY Times gift link requires a login.)
He's a paleontologist and the talk starts with some pretty interesting statistical analysis aiming to estimate T rex clutch sizes (66 eggs) and hatchling weights (1.5kg) as well as T rex parental care. It ends with looking at evolutionary history trends in increasing parental investment in radically different animals.
He talks a little slow, so a little playback speed bump won't go amiss.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/climate/united-nations-cl...
Edit: Removed the headline quotation because the search listing and article heading differ.
Most conversation about climate change has been around global average temps raising in C. Further, switching that back and forth and doubling it for F would be seen as manipulative by people that don’t want to hear it.
On the contrary, the Times’s US audience (probably their main audience) thinks of body temp, which this is, in F.
To add further, the audience and writers that want to share cool, new dinosaur fact and the group that does an update on global warming are different people and operate and think differently around these specific things in these specific contexts.
Of course it would be easier to add the letter, but I can definitely see why it wasn’t included.
It also turns out, as someone else in this thread has noted, NYT's style guides say to not include the unit in headlines, so here we are :)
By the way, Google Fit's body-temperature entry is cool, but when it comes to "Location", why is "mouth" in the middle of the list and next to some other, unrelated parts? How is the list being sorted?