Given the likelihood in nature of being attacked and wounded, how come they never came to have more hardened skin to prevent being penetrated so easily?
In: 48
>OP: “never came to gave more hardened skin”
OP’s question implies that no animals ever have evolved thick hide or armor.
Elephants, Rhinos, Hippos, Crocodilians, Armadillos, Walruses, Whales, sharks, Bears, literally all chitinous insects and arthropods.
Those are just off the top of my head animals that have either thick hard skin or something similar like blubber or thick fur that acts as an external barrier between a predator and internal organs.
Ultimately though, survival is about trade-offs and adapting to the environment at hand, not finding some universal perfect form. If your skin is too thick or hard, you lose mobility and the ability to find food efficiently or escape from other kinds of danger that armor can’t protect against.
And pretty much the answer to any question that is “why does animal X have characteristic Y”, it’s because characteristic Y was very helpful at some point to animal X’s ancestors, which at some point mutated some subtler version of characteristic Y before it was useful, and so every individual that had that already had that characteristic when it suddenly became useful in that environment, survived longer and had more children than the individuals that didn’t have it, and that characteristic became more and more exaggerated in each future generation that it was passed down to.
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