My theory, which is mine, on disosaurs

a_unique_person

Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
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The predictions for GW are that the weather gets more extreme. Nature, from the little that I have learned, avoids excess, and the massive size of some dinosaurs, which have not since been replicated, has puzzled me.

My guess, the extreme weather of a warmer world gave massive animals an advantage, in that they could survive the floods and storms better than smaller animals.
 
Why would a larger animal be more able to survive a flood or stormy conditions?

Large animals on the scale of say a diplodocus would require tremendous amounts of food to survive. Floods destroy sources of food.

Small scavengers are much more apt for survival in extreme conditions.
 
Other predictions for GW include total melting of Arctic pack ice, sinking of dense cold water, displacement to the south of North Atlantic Drift and resultant widespread glaciation from the Alps north.

I'm betting on tuskless Chinese Wooly Mammoths taking over the world.
 
Also, it doesn´t explain why the majority of dinosaur species are a lot smaller than those giants. Some very successful species had about the size of a chicken.
And their size did not give the dinosaurs the advantage they needed to survive whatever it was that got them all - while the (comparatively tiny) mammals survived.
 
The Inverse Square law

The Inverse Square law dictates sizes of animals. An animal that is twce as big in all dimensions has 8 times the weight but only 4 times the surface area for cooling. That is why so many cold environment species are larger than their warm weather equivalents. Think Mammoth vs Elephant, Polar bear vs Black bear. Sooo, dinos were huge either to conserve heat in cold places, or as an adaptation to overcome their coldbloodeness- a bigger, warmer critter would be able to be more active on cloudy days without doing pushups in the sun. Sooo, maybe the biggies of the reptilian world evolved their size as the world cooled off for an upcoming ice age?

Re: Inverse square of "The incredible Giant Man", a man twice as tall would weigh 8 times as much, and have leg bones only 4 times as big in cross section. These legs would be very fragile with double the weight to support/ per cross sectional area. Sooo, Bigfoot needs proportionaly thicker legs than a man's. Especially if he weighs 800 pounds.
 
I'm betting on an evolutionary race with large predators combined with an abundant supply of food.
 

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