How come dinosaurs like the titanosaur grow to such large size, when animals like the elephant cant grow larger due to the square cube law?

Question

As far as i know, there arent bigger animals around today due to the square-cube law, and yet their were dinosaurs the size of whales on land?

In: 906

Answer 1

Dinosaurs were built like birds (birds *are* dinosaurs in fact) – they had strong but light skeletons, weight saving air sacs throughout their upper body, and more efficient lungs than mammals that helped get oxygen for their huge bodies.

When the asteroid hit 65 million years ago every animal bigger than around 25kg went extinct, dinosaurs and mammals.

While small flighted dinosaurs did survive and are known as birds today, as both the small mammals and dinosaurs started to re-evolve large animals the mammals were able to do so better (probably because live birthed babies can be bigger than egg hatched babies) and that prevented birds from evolving back to T-Rex sized animals (just like mammals couldn’t evolve big while large dinosaurs were around).

Although one thing to remember is that blue whales are larger than any dinosaurs and are the largest animal to have ever lived.