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sauropods: homotherm,heterotherm or gigantotherm?
Considering the enormous size of the largest sauropods and their food
requirements, what kind of metabolism is currently thought to have been the
one posessed by them?
Homothermy would seem allmost impossible to me. How could an animal as large
as a Seismosaurus have met its food requirements for one day within that
very same day? And it is not like there was only Seismosaurus feeding,but
numerous sauropods seem to have coexisted at any given time which means
ecosystems would have to provide enormous quantities of food at once.
Heterotherm seems like an option,due to the lower food requirements,but
aren't dinosaurs thought to exhibit homothermy or near-homothermy as a
plesiomorphic feature? Do naked mole rats and ,possibly,crocodiles count as
heterotherms descended from homotherms?
Then I remember there being a theory about sauropods being
gigantotherm,meaning that they maintained their body temperature by means of
their size and the warmth that automatically makes them keep,allowing them
to lead active,homotherm lives,without being homotherm themselves and they
would also circumvent the problem of the food requirements,of course. But I
do not believe there are analogs for something like that. Also,wouldn't it
mean that younger or smaller sauropods (Magyarasaurus for example) had a
metabolism they could not rely on?
In short,what's the present consensus about sauropod metabolism?
Brian