Dinosaurs seemed to have generally been so much larger than animals today. Huge dragonflies that dwarf their modern counterparts, turtles 10ft long. What is the mechanism that allowed them to be so large, or conversely makes modern ones smaller? Is it about Oxygen levels, or efficiency, or something else?
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So, here’s the thing. Even just a few tens of thousands years ago, there were still a lot of megafauna in a bunch of places (mammoths, massive ground sloths, big armadillo-like glyptodons, etc.). They largely went away because they were fantastic and (relatively) easy sources of food and resources for us humans, who hunted them to extinction.
If you graph the areas that still contain big animals, the areas that lost the highest percentages of their big animals are all the furthest away from Africa by land. That’s because creatures in Africa and nearby areas evolved with humans, so they had some defense, whereas humans entering the Americas were entering a place that had never seen an apex predator like us before.
If whales hadn’t been intelligent enough to evolve new defense strategies when commercial whaling became a thing, they’d be extinct as well.
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