Tyrannosaurus rex was an athletic, warm-blooded animal that jogged rather than lumbered around its territory, according to a new study.

Researchers led by Herman Pontzer at Washington University in St Louis examined the anatomical details of 14 dinosaurs of different sizes to work out how much energy the animals might have needed to move around. He found that, for dinosaurs weighing from a few kilograms to tonnes, the power their muscles needed was far too high for the animals to have been cold-blooded.

"We found that the energy costs of locomotion for them, the amount of oxygen they'd have to consume to walk and run, would have far exceeded the rate of energy use that cold-blooded animals are able to sustain," said Pontzer. "This says they may well have been warm-blooded and, if so, we can't think of them as slow, lumbering reptiles any more."

His results are published today in the journal PLoS ONE.

Scientists have been arguing since the 1950s over whether dinosaurs were warm or cold blooded, because each type of metabolism implies different physical attributes. Cold-blooded animals, such as modern lizards, are heavily dependent on the temperature around them to stay active – so they are limited to living, for the most part, in relatively warm parts of the world and are only active during the day.

Warm-blooded animals, such as modern mammals and birds, can live anywhere and move around or hunt for food at any time of day. Maintaining a stable internal temperature, however, costs a lot of energy and requires the animals to feed more regularly.

"If you take the classic view of dinosaurs being cold-blooded animals, they'd be limited in the same way as cold-blooded animals today," said Pontzer. "They wouldn't have been able to be successful in as many parts of the landscape, they wouldn't have been as active [or] have some of the same characteristics in terms of mental and physical capabilities as warm-blooded animals."

If dinosaurs were warm blooded, it could explain their success in taking over large parts of the prehistoric world for hundreds of millions of years throughout the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

Pontzer's analysis grew out of an approach he had already developed for understanding and predicting movement costs in living animals. His recent work had showed, for example, that the energy cost of walking and running was associated with leg length. The distance from the hip joint to the ground predicted the observed energy cost of movement with 98% accuracy for a wide variety of land animals.

"We want to understand how limb design determines the energy costs of walking and running. Specifically the shape of the bones as well as the posture an animal uses dictates how much muscle they need to turn on every step to walk or run," he said.

"It became obvious that these methods would be really applicable to dinosaurs so we took detailed anatomical models of these dinosaurs and we applied the methods."