During the dinosaur age, some were just massive. Why are modern land mammals, and others so tiny. Comparing a modern tiger to a sabertooth is no contest.
In: Biology
There’s plenty of hypothesis for animals from that era to become so massive. First one it’s the atmospheric oxygen percentage, during the dinossaurs era it was almost 30%, that made it possible for any animal to grow to inimaginable sizes, more oxygen means more energy can be produced per breathe, insects have the most impressive changes, because with just an increase of less than 10% in atmospheric oxygen some insect species were able to grow to over a foot long, they use diffusion to get oxygen to their cells, instead of blood and diffusion depends heavily on atmospheric oxygen percentage.
Second hypothesis, the average temperature was much hotter due to high levels of carbon dioxide higher than today, this leads to bigger bodies having an advantage because if a dinossaur evolved to large-enough sizes, scientists believe, it would have achieved “homeothermy,” that is, the ability to maintain its interior temperature despite the prevailing environmental conditions. This is because a house-sized, homeothermic, aka, cold-blooded, animal could warm up slowly (in the sun, during the day) and cool down equally slowly (at night), giving it a fairly constant average body temperature, whereas a smaller reptile would be at the mercy of ambient temperatures on an hour-by-hour basis.
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