After the dinosaurs went extinct, why didn’t new giant animals come to be?
In: Biology
Being big is simply one survival strategy among many, like being able to fly, or having a hard shell. Nothing necessitates it evolves, nor that it is an effective strategy. For instance, it requires a lot of food, and generally a lot of territory.
Large animals have existed since the dinosaurs, large ones still exist today, and for that matter many dinosaurs weren’t big. However, after the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, being big was a problem as food was scarce. Today being large is a problem because humans have carved up much of the surface of the earth and don’t like dangerous things nearby, so it’s easy to be killed off or starve. Other large animals have perished through time from various causes, such as climate change and the like affecting their environments, for instance disrupting food supply.
So basically, there have been new giant animals, and still are, but nothing necessitates they come to be and there are plenty of alternative strategies for survival that are used instead, just like how flying can be super useful but not every animal flies. Beyond that, it’s only sometimes an advantage, and in the modern day human civilization frequently makes it disadvantageous to be too big.
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