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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Up until quite recently, they weren’t. You’ve got a case of selection bias – big animals are exciting so they get put on display more. We have all of prehistory to scour for the giant counterparts of modern animals, and even if a specific time period only had a few giants (like our modern elephants, giraffes, tigers and polar bears), we can pick up the giants of EVERY time period and put them on display together.
There were specific time periods with a lot of large animals, like the famous Jurassic and Cretaceous, but there were also time periods where most animals were smaller than today. The Triassic for example had pretty small animals overall.
That being said, there ARE fewer giant land animals NOW than there were before humans, because we killed them. Big animals are relatively easy to hunt if you have weapons and fire, provide a lot of meat, are dangerous if predatory and therefore targets, require a lot more food (so are vulnerable to humans messing with their ecosystem in other ways) and reproduce slowly. All of these traits make them prone to extinction when humans enter the picture.
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