The metabolisms of an elephant may more efficient than that of a mouse, but it still needs a much greater quantity of food to survive. As for trees, they survived because their seeds were able to lay dormant until the sun returned.

Yes.

That is a good idea. The possibility that many compsognathids are young carnosaurs would complicate it though.

@@chimerasuchus fine, I'll settle for maniraptorans & ornithomimosaurs

An Argentinosaurus didn't need as much food as its weight equivalent of elephants, just as a elephant doesn't need as much food as its equivalent weight in mice. It had a different weight to surface value ratio, and therefore lost less of the heat it produced to its environment. The sauropod digestive system also also allowed them to extract more nutrients from their, often low quality, food. They also had the benefit of not needing to expend nearly as much energy moving when foraging due to their long necks. They would have needed to spend a lot of time eating, but scientific models have found it was perfectly plausible.

@@chimerasuchus wow. So you're so determined to make them fit. You're doing the exact opposite of what science is Instead of reaching a conclusion based on evidence. You're twisting evidence to force your preconceived ideas That is not how science works Besides your false concept of science. You have to fill in the blanks with pure fiction. And also downright fallacies. There's no evidence whatsoever that saurpods digestion was more efficient. In fact. The very idea they need to eat stones to aid digestion, days their digestion was ineffective. Saurpods DID NOT MOVE AROUND MORE EFFICIENTLY The larger the animal the more INEFFICIENT. It's mobility. You want to spout nonsense about a thousand mice eating the same as a saurpod of equivalent mass? In reality. It's the exact opposite. The larger the animal, the more INEFFICIENT. It is That's why ELEPHANTS EAT 18 HOURS A DAY. To consume 200kg. While they weigh 5 tonnes. An animal which weighs only 50 kg. Like a chimpanzee is 1/100th the size of an elephant yet only needs 6.5 kg of food. So a chimp is 1/100th the size but eats less than 1/100th the food More importantly a chimp doesn't need 18 HOURS A DAY TO EAT More like an hour A saurpod unlike a chimp which is a more picky eater and which eats protein rich food like fruit and some meat.. they eat only greenery leaves and vegetation like an elephant So they'll require far more food and do far more eating for the same calories. Even palaeontology says saurpods are like gigantic dustbins. So they're definitely not eating nutrient rich food. They're eating the leaves and foliage from tops of trees other animals can't reach. BUT EVEN IF A SAURPODS DOES have a more efficient digestion and mobility You might be able to stretch the truth and say even though an elephant needing 150 kg and 18 hours a day to eat. A saurpod SHOULD need 850 kg and 8 times longer to eat. But EVEN FOR ARGUMENTS SAKE. Even if you reduced that amount from 850 to just 300. WHICH IS A GIGANTIC REDUCTION IN MATHEMATICS. It would still need 36 HOURS IN A 24 HOUR DAY TO EAT!!! What do you want to imply exactly? That despite what science tells us about animal size Vs food needed A saurpod doesn't need 850 kg because it has an efficient digestion (whatever that means) so what? It needs barely more than an elephant one tenth it's size? Because it doesn't need TO KEEP WARM??! wtf elephants spend all day trying to keep cool not stay warm. And they definitely DO NOT need to eat one tenth the amount of food just because they have no heating problems that's INSANE Do you know why an animal 100 times bigger needs to eat MORE than 100 times as much? That's called SCIENCE the larger an animal is. The energy required to move exponentially increases. BEYOND SCALE That's why elephants and other large animals need so much damn food and spend their entire waking hours eating. I'm not buying some fictitious b.s you have to invent about a magical digestion and a Tesla digestion just to force a narrative to fit Try harder