I’ve always wondered why we never get anything as big as dinosaurs were, nowadays our biggest land animal is the african elephant with a average weight of 8500kg whilst back then we got creatures that were much bigger, what caused this
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Mostly selection bias. Your comparing a group of animals that lived in different periods over a 200 million+ year times span to animals you can see outside today. Also only the biggest of those creatures are likely to leave behind easily discoverable fossils introducing another form of bias.
The other big issue is we did used to have bigger creatures than the Elephant but humans killed them all. If you’re an ancient human it made more sense to go for the big animals with tons of meat to feed your family vs say a crow.
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