1 Draak: Beasts not speak cold blood tongue.
2 Alvissa: But that's fantastic! This proves the hypothesis that theropod dinosaurs are in fact warm-blooded!
3 Lambert: Marvellous. Remind me to submit an academic paper on that.
4 Alvissa: One should always be receptive to uncovering the wonders of nature.
4 Lambert: I'd rather uncover the wonder of staying alive.

One of the big ongoing scientific debates in paleontology concerns the physiology and metabolism of dinosaurs. Evidence in the microsructure of fossilised dinosaur bones is so far inconclusive, but suggestive of the possibility that at least some dinosaur species were fully endothermic, like modern mammals and birds. The simple answer, at the moment, is that nobody's really sure one way or the other.

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2025-06-26 Rerun commentary: I went to check on recent findings in this field, half expecting to have to update the information with something more definitive. But, no! It seems that 15 years after this comic was first published, we still don't really know what sort of metabolism dinosaurs had, and the scientific debate continues.

(I also realise why in the previous strip of this theme the Allosaurus was not speaking cold-blood tongue. I'd forgotten it was a deliberate story point!)