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Because hair retains body heat, modern large mammals such as elephants and rhinoceroses are largely hairless. Prothero has proposed that, contrary to most depictions, Paraceratherium had large elephant-like ears that it used for thermoregulation. The ears of elephants enlarge the body's surface area and are filled with blood vessels, making the ...
The physiology of dinosaurs has historically been a controversial subject, particularly their thermoregulation.Recently, many new lines of evidence have been brought to bear on dinosaur physiology generally, including not only metabolic systems and thermoregulation, but on respiratory and cardiovascular systems as well.
Gigantothermy (sometimes called ectothermic homeothermy or inertial homeothermy) is a phenomenon with significance in biology and paleontology, whereby large, bulky ectothermic animals are more easily able to maintain a constant, relatively high body temperature than smaller animals by virtue of their smaller surface-area-to-volume ratio. [1]
The skin is grey with scanty hairs, and bending cracks which support thermoregulation by retaining water. The African bush elephant inhabits a variety of habitats such as forests, grasslands, woodlands, wetlands and agricultural land. It is a mixed herbivore feeding mostly on grasses, creepers, herbs, leaves, and bark. The average adult ...
The resting human body generates about two-thirds of its heat through metabolism in internal organs in the thorax and abdomen, as well as in the brain. The brain generates about 16% of the total heat produced by the body. [8] Heat loss is a major threat to smaller creatures, as they have a larger ratio of surface area to volume.
After bathing, the elephant will usually use its trunk to blow dust onto its body, which dries into a protective crust. Elephants have difficulty releasing heat through the skin because of their low surface-area-to-volume ratio , which is many times smaller than that of a human.
This internal body temperature is often, though not necessarily, higher than the immediate environment [2] (from Greek ὅμοιος homoios "similar" and θέρμη thermē "heat"). Homeothermy is one of the 3 types of thermoregulation in warm-blooded animal species. Homeothermy's opposite is poikilothermy. A poikilotherm is an organism that ...
Thermoregulation is the ability of an organism to keep its body temperature within certain boundaries, even when the surrounding temperature is very different. A thermoconforming organism, by contrast, simply adopts the surrounding temperature as its own body temperature, thus avoiding the need for internal thermoregulation.