Eli5 why most animals today are small compared to prehistoric animals we’ve discovered?

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Feels like there was a lot more megafauna in prehistoric earth than there are today

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Well, to put in some perspective, the largest animal to have every existed is alive right now, the Blue Whale, as are some of the largest plants known to have existed.

There are a few other factors to consider as well. Many large dinosaurs had a lot of unique adaptations that allowed their bodies to be lighter and more efficient at larger sizes, a feature that birds carry on today that allows them instead to take flight.

We also tend to overestimate how big dinosaurs were thanks to movies. most dinosaurs were fairly small, and while some did get very large, its worth noting that in terms of both size, mass, and strength, a full grown bull elephant or rhinoceros would have been an intimidating threat to all but the largest few species of predatory dinosaurs, even a T-Rex would consider it risky prey. Sauropods by length are huge, but a lot of that length is in thin necks and tails.

The final factor is us. We are directly or partly responsible for the extinction of a lot of megafauna that were still living at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, such as Mammoths or the Giant Sloth, along with the major climate shift of the receding ice age. Since that time, hunting, poaching, and territory loss has pushed most animals to become smaller and not larger, or they are killed before they can reach their full size.

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