Why do humans cannot grow as giant where dinosaurs and some plants in prehistoric times can?

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Is it related to food? Or genetics or climate or something else? Thank you!

In: Biology

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well, you can’t just scale up a human and expect everything to work. Your leg bones wouldn’t be strong enough to support your weight, and you’d overheat because your volume (and thus heat generating capacity) goes up as a factor of a cube of your height, while your surface area (ability to dissipate heat) goes up with the square.

If you’re asking why we didn’t evolve to be that sort of size, there are hard limits on how big a mammal can grow due to the requirement to carry the young internally and give birth to them live–this is a difficult and error-prone process. Seaborne mammals like blue whales are helped by being able to be supported by the water, land creatures don’t get that, which is why the largest mammals around are elephants–and their children spend nearly 2 years in the womb before being born!

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