Why were prehistoric era animals so gigantic in comparison to animals from the “modern era”
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The problem is that you’re comparing at the very least MILLIONS of years to the last few thousand, that skews perception. Also which animals? We are talking MILLIONS of years here, so it kinda varies from time to time. Giant insects were due to higher oxygen levels on the atmosphere (they breath through their skin, it is not super efficient, so if the levels go down, their size thus consumption has to go down).
Ancient dinosaurs and those often misidentified as them, it is a case of it is +165 million years. You’re bound to find a handful of particularly extreme exceptional species along that time, many of which rose and died off/evolved off and they never co-existed. At any one time, it is hard to say they had drastically larger animals than we do. Yet, we often of them all together, as creatures living all at the same one time period, “the past”. And we often ignore that for every very large dinosaur, there was a crap ton small ones that would shit themselves near a polar bear. At least one source I saw listed the average as something between a rhino and an elephant, and that is from species from all over the timeline. Visual size is also deceiving, depends what the metric you use. A T-Rex was bigger than an African elephant by length and a bit too by height, but by mass (arguably the more important metric) they’re about the same iirc (at least same ball park). And of course, don’t forget our present day blue whale is the largest animal by mass to ever live, and by length still one of the largest on land or sea.
TL;DR: you’re comparing the extreme top sizes and amount of large species of just today with the extreme TOP sizes of at the very least millions of years combined – not a surprise the practically infinitely larger timeframe will have had more exceptional species.
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