Why were sauropods cold-blooded?

Answer 1

They were not. As first shown by world-famous paleontologist Robert Bakker, Dinosaurs were warmblooded. The rapid evolutionary patterns in dinosaurs, as well as their life span, exctinction, and niches in ecosystems all point to their being warmblooded, whereas there is absolutely NO evidence to support their cold-bloodedness. It is simply mamalian bias, stemmed from a massive superiority complex that humanity is the best animal ever, and thus mamals are better than all other forms of life. The evolutionary trends in a warm blooded animal are to have a rapid diversification of species. The trends in cold blooded animals are to evolve very, very slowly. For example, Crocodiles and turtles haven't changed much in tens of millions of years. Dinosaurs, obviously, follow the warm blooded pattern. Warm blooded animals have very short lives. Most mamals have lifespans averaging 30 years or less. Humans have inreased this by using medicine to increase lifespans, but the natural lifespan of a human is about 40 years. Cold blooded animals, like tortises and crocodiles, live far longer. The natural lifespan of the Galapagos Tortise exceeeds even the improved lifespan of humanity, generally living for 100+ years. Dinosaurs seem to have had shorter lifespans, in coherency with their warm-bloodedness. As everyone knows, dinosaurs are extinct. Many people have wondered why all of the dinosaurs died out during the mass extinction at the end of the Crectatious (spelled wrong, I know), but almost no crocodiles, turtles, or other reptiles died out. This is because dinosaurs were warm blooded. Warm blooded animals, history shows, are always harder hit by extinction events, and more likely to go extinct, than cold blooded ones. Warm blooded animals need to consume large amounts of food to sustain their higher metabolisms, and so cannot survive as long in adverse conditions as cold blooded animals. The dinosaurs, because they were warm blooded, could not hibernate, scrape along, or otherwise weather out the extinction event and so died out, whereas the crocodiles and turtles merely went to sleep for a few months, surviving because of their low, cold blooded, metabolism. Lastly, the roles of large land predator and large land herbavore, as well as all other dominant roles in the food web, were held, during their time, by dinosaurs. Cold blooded animals, because they are slow and cannot sustain long periods of activity, fulfill the roles of small and, occasionally, medium predator, and small herbavore. Because warm blooded animals can sustain higher levels of activity, and stay active for longer periods of time, they tend to dominate the large predator and herbavore roles. Dinosaurs dominated these roles completely and so they are obviously warm blooded. Dinosaurs, as shown above, were warm blooded. All evidence points to this, and there is no evidence that dinosaurs were cold blooded.