Why were prehistoric era animals so gigantic in comparison to animals from the “modern era”
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Interestingly, there is a theory out there now about the lack of large apex animals. Many, many years in the past, like 150,000 years ago or something (I’m sure I’m wrong about the time) most habitats in the world had large apex animals. Basically the top of the food chain type animals. Not all meat eaters, but mostly them. Things like raptors the size of small planes, giant saber tooth animals, Australia had a land turtle the almost the size of a VW bug, there are many more examples of these that slip my mind.
The main theory is that there were some extinction level events, decades long droughts, volcanic activity, things along those lines. The thought is that the apex animals were so specialized that they couldn’t adapt.
In the past decade or so a new theory has started to come out, a bit of a controversial one. When researchers were looking at the fossil records they noticed that a lot of the large apex animals were dying out regionally, not world wide. If you consider large, elephant like animals, they were distributed relatively evenly across Europe, Asia, and North America. If it was a climate issue you would expect them to all die out around the same time, give or take a few hundred years. This would be the same for other apex animals with wide distribution.
The problem is, you don’t really see that. Most of the time you see these types of animals dying out around the same time as early humans started to show up in the area. We didn’t pop into the world all over. We probably started in Africa and slowly spread around the world in waves. When we would move into new areas we would encounter these large animals that hadn’t really developed any defenses against human pack hunting. And when you have a tribe to feed it’s easier to take down one large animal than a dozen smaller ones.
The time lines line up. North America had apex animals for the longest time because humans got here last, essentially.
Now yes, there were extinction events, there was the ice age, etc… but it’s almost too much of a coincidence that large land animals died out in regions around the time that our human ancestors moved into the neighborhood
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