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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My unprofessional take is that the big dinosaurs died because they couldn’t adapt as well to the rapidly changing conditions compared to the smaller flying ones during the last mass extinction. Most of the big mammals are gone because we ate all of them or changed their ecosystems. Some of them are still around though, like whales.
Also fossil record goes back a very long time, so it might also be a kind of a selection bias. There might be many giants in the making at the moment but they just haven’t got there yet.
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