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An ectotherm (from the Greek ἐκτός (ektós) "outside" and θερμός (thermós) "heat"), more commonly referred to as a " cold-blooded animal ", [1] is an animal in which internal physiological sources of heat, such as blood, are of relatively small or of quite negligible importance in controlling body temperature. [2]
Animals can be further categorized as endotherms, which regulate their temperature internally, and ectotherms, which regulate temperature by the use of external heat sources. "Warm-bloodedness" is a complex and rather ambiguous term, because it includes some or all of: Homeothermy, i.e. maintaining a fairly constant body temperature.
The pre-flight warm-up behavior of a moth. Insect thermoregulation is the process whereby insects maintain body temperatures within certain boundaries.Insects have traditionally been considered as poikilotherms (animals in which body temperature is variable and dependent on ambient temperature) as opposed to being homeothermic (animals that maintain a stable internal body temperature ...
t. e. 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.
A few decades later, Atkinson (1994) performed a similar review of temperature effects on body size in ectotherms. His study, which included 92 species of ectotherms ranging from animals and plants to protists and bacteria, concluded that a reduction in temperature resulted in an increase in organism size in 83.5% of cases.
Elevation of body temperature via metabolic production of heat. Weak or absent metabolic control of a particular body temperature. The first trait distinguishes mesotherms from ectotherms, the second from endotherms. For instance, endotherms, when cold, will generally resort to shivering or metabolizing brown fat to maintain a constant body ...
The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event, [ a ] also known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary(K–T)extinction, [ b ] was the mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth [ 2 ][ 3 ] approximately 66 million years ago. The event caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs.
e. Reptiles arose about 320 million years ago [1] during the Carboniferous period. Reptiles, in the traditional sense of the term, are defined as animals that have scales or scutes, lay land-based hard-shelled eggs, and possess ectothermic metabolisms. So defined, the group is paraphyletic, excluding endothermic animals like birds that are ...