Weird, my browser somehow doesn’t render the title as “T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97 Degrees whichever unit doesn’t kill the dinosaur”. It just leaves that last part out, making it even shorter than “F”.
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.
You're right but: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746671">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746671
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/climate/united-nations-climate-target-overshoot.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/climate/united-nations-cl...
Edit: Removed the headline quotation because the search listing and article heading differ.
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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.
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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 :)
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