Feels like there was a lot more megafauna in prehistoric earth than there are today
In: 20
1. Small bones are way less likely to stick around long enough to fossilize
2. Still, there **are** tons of small fossil species, more than huge ones. They’re less well-known than the huge ones for obvious reasons
3. we killed most “modern” large animals long before we knew better (and plenty more after we knew better), so your standard of comparison is skewed
4. You’re looking backwards at the biggest, coolest animals from 500 million years of life. If you actually spread those animals out over 500 million years, you wouldn’t think they were as common as you think now. T-rex and Stegosaurus never met each other, they lived 100 million years apart.
To sum up, the distribution of small vs large species in the past was probably pretty close to what it was “today” (or 50,000 years ago before humans started an extinction event).
Latest Answers