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
Harder skin surface gives relatively little benefit in relation to what it takes away: Being agile, having secrition glands on it’s surface, having harder time with thermal regulation, requiring more nutrition to keep that skin hard etc.
Remember that when it comes to evolution the strongest selective preassure isn’t the predators, it’s the enviorement itself, that’s why it’s “survival of the fittest” and not “survival of the strongest”. If something can protect you from being eaten but it makes you more likely to die from overheating, or makes it harder for you to get food or anything like that, then it likely won’t be passed down to future generations. Of course there are exceptions to that like to pretty much every rule in biology that exists.
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