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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Part of it is survivorship bias (of fossils). The bigger animals tended to have the biggest bones, and those have a better chance of surviving as fossils.
It’s also not exactly true that modern animals are a lot smaller. The blue whale is the largest animal to ever exist and is around today. In addition, the Earth was full of giant turtles, giant ground sloths, mammoths, and other huge animals until pretty recently. However it seems that when Homo sapiens arrived on the scene we tended to prefer hunting the bigger animals and quickly drove them to extinction.
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