To ward off overheating, large animals such as elephants and rhinos had to evolve strategies to keep cool. Dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex likely faced the same problem—and new research finds that the huge carnivores solved it by developing giant air conditioners in their heads.Researchers led by Casey Holliday looked at large holes in the tops of carnivorous dinosaur skulls. Careful anatomical study revealed that the cavities probably contained tissue rich with fat and blood vessels.These structures may have been useful for dumping heat into the environment when dinosaurs were running too hot and absorbing heat when they got cold, the team reports in the journal The Anatomical Record.“We found that the big dinosaurs—and even some of the little ones, like Velociraptor—had these kinds of pouches that probably had blood vessels in them and were helpful for thermal regulation,” says Holliday, a paleontologist at the University of Missouri School of Medicine.For more than a century, paleontologists thought that these holes helped hold the jaw muscles of species such as T. rex, since in dinosaurs and their living kin, birds, the depressions lie right in front of major jaw-muscle openings. But when Holliday studied these skull spaces in dinosaurs, alligators, and other animals, the old explanation didn’t add up. The bone’s smooth surface suggested that muscle fibers and tendons didn’t attach there.Instead, when the researchers studied the anatomy of modern alligators and birds—some of the closest living relatives to dinosaurs—they saw that these animals tended to fill the region with fat and blood vessels. Much like the heat exchanger on an air-conditioning unit, the structure could have allowed blood to radiate or absorb heat from the environment.To test their interpretation, researchers used thermal imaging cameras to observe the heads of modern alligators. The footage showed that at different points of the day, the same skull area was relatively warmer or cooler than the rest of the animal’s head, depending on whether the animals needed to dissipate heat or collect it.One of the major physiological challenges that large animals have is being able to shed heat, especially if they weren’t warm-blooded. For big dinosaurs such as T. rex, large cooling structures in the head would have been extremely helpful for maintaining a constant brain temperature.