How Big Can Animals Get?
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- Опубліковано 5 лют 2020
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Sauropods were the largest land animals that ever existed but how did they get this big? Why haven’t animals ever got that large again? And what can giant ocean going animals teach us about the biology of animal size limits?
Sources:
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Video: “and so insects, like Arthropleura”
Me: *spit take*
Your sub count is criminally low for the quality of content you produce. Keep it up.
agreed, but at least it is increasing steadily ;)
So true
@@pspk94 when i posted this it was like 6k. im so proud.
I’m new to the channel pretty crazy you just replied after 6 months
In order for his sub count to reach massive sizes, the ecosystem on youtube would have to be very different
Lighter bones, highly efficient structure of neck and tail, more efficient respiratory system, egg laying, lower metabolism... dinosaurs have a lot of anatomical advantages over mammals in regards to getting huge. Yet whales manage to beat them thanks to krill and other tiny sea critters... go figure.
Well, being in water, on top of giving that food advantage, allows to negate the weight problem, since the body doesn't have to sustain itself. It also makes termal regulation easier, as thermal excursions are reduced.
Basically all of these amazing features that allowed sauropods to be so big are unneeded for whales.
Big animals have lower metabolism than small animals anyway... full grown sauropods were basically staying warm because of their sheer mass.
and yet large marine mammals also have the issue of dying off when temperatures rise, they require colder temperatures for body heat regulation.
guess what's going to happen to the marine mammals with global warming?
@@tylermech66 they dying because change in temperature changes all water vegetation and subsequently krill and other critters availability. Marine mammals don't care about fractions of centigrade. Blue whales live from tropics to almost north pole.
@@muradm7748 ... I could have better explained my point, i suppose. what you said is actually what i meant, the knock on effects.
Actually cetaceans were much smaller when megalodon and raptorial sperm whales were around: it has been suggested the large size of modern baleen whales is partly due to these predators going extinct.
And because someone is inevitably going to mention this: the oxygen thing only applies to land-based arthropods. Lungs (especially lungs capable of one-way breathing, which dinosaurs did and still do have) and gills are much more efficient and are largely freed from this restraint.
The Ice Ages made giant baleen whales possible. Not only was it the major reason for the extinction of the megalodon, but more importently created an extrem amount of food in form of krill accessible to substain this size.
@@hailgiratinathetruegod7564 Megalodon died out in the Pliocene before the cycle of Pleistocene glacials and interglacials began. It is true the world was getting cooler at that time, but it was before what most people think of as the "ice ages".
Also, most baleen whales aren't krill specialists, but prey more heavily on other small crustaceans (right whales, bowheads, grey whales, sei whales) or schools of small fish (all rorquals other than blue and sei whales). The blue whale's honestly the outlier for being a krill specialist.
@@bkjeong4302 Well first, about the food, I was ont only talking about krill ( it was jsut the best example) since cooler oceans in general a richer in sea life, since they are both more nutrians and oxygen. So the cooling trend made the ocean life, espically smaler fish and crustceans.
And about the ice ages, I meant it in the sense of the Late Cenozoic Ice Age
, which os the coooling trend you were talking about. The ice ages of the pliocene, which is the typical ice age people talk about. Evren though the start of the pleistocene correlates with the final extinction of the megalodon, arround 2,6 million years. So even on this sence. am I not compleatly wrong.
How do dinosaurs still have anything if they don't exist anymore? Did you mean reptiles?
trezapoioiuy he means birds, the descendants of theropod dinosaurs lol
I have heard that Sauropods may have had a heat retention problem because of their relatively low surface to volume ratio. And the long necks and tails that they all have may have served as heat radiators. Whales, submerged in Arctic waters, have no trouble over heating.
Not to mention air is a poor conductor of heat while water is the opposite, allowing for a whale to just passively loose heat while a sauropod would have to evolve structures like that to work
They must of had some crazy big poops!
I haven't considered that...... But that couldn't be more right
I hadn't thought of that but they must have been massive
would be funny if one day a paleontologist finds the fossil of a small therapod that was killed by getting hit by sauropod shit
TheShadowNinja1 lmao just smothered
@@wolfofdiscord7092 Elephant Laxative style
Wow thanks for the video, it's greatly appreciated for the educational value . Thanks for clearing some misconceptions I had 💕
this is leaving a lot out like the fact that sauropods didn't have to chew, also larger size is more energetically efficient when swimming
Yrs, not chewing allowed for more caloric intake
He mentioned that it is easier to carry heavier weight when swimming. So he implied that larger size is more energetically efficient
How do you think the environment would need to change to see animals larger than sauropods?
bigger earth I guess?
weaker gravity, more energy rich foliage for herbivores
... it would need to be ocean.
Lol, jk, I know what the question is really asking.
The environment would need to have massive amounts of high quality food (not grass) and some fearsome predators. Also, the animals that were becoming giants wouldn't be able to be mammals. Between weight, lung efficiency, energy requirements and pregnancy issues it is highly doubtful that any land mammal would get near the size of the largest sauropods. Especially if we are talking about height. If weight or especially height was the measure then it mite be possible.
Birds have the best anatomical features for large size, but all of them are either fliers or bipedal so I don't see them ever beating sauropods in anything but height regardless of the environment.
Crocodiles have the low metabolism and don't need to worry about pregnancy or weight (to some extent) thanks to living mostly in water... but they would need to have absolutely massive prey species in order to drive their size increase. So unless elephants and hippos become a major food source for crocs I don't see a reason for them to get larger.
if they were farm animals and we bred them to enter in a County Fair
In the Larry Niven "Known Space" science fiction universe there are land creatures larger than Blue Whales. The Bandersnatch. They are described as twice the size of the biggest sauropods. They were not a product of evolution. They were bred by a now extinct intelligent alien species. They are rather odd. They are giant single cell organisms yet intelligent. They appear in many of his novels and stories and have also appeared in the Sci-Fi yarns of other writers.
Another limiter on insect size is that to make big adults, larvae have to grow bigger as well. This takes more time and food/energy. Moulting and regrowing the exoskeleton also becomes more difficult the bigger an invertabrate is, which just prolongs the period when the animal is at it’s most vulnerable.
biggest limiter on them are other animals, they can't perform good enough to compete on the same level.
The difficulty in moulting is different for some groups of arthropods. Crustaceans have a very complex body shape, and need to get out of their exoskeleton by lunging backwards. This makes very old crustaceans vulnerable when moulting. However, horseshoe crabs have one of the easiest moulting processes in the arthropod world. Their carapace is literally just a circle, and their telson too gets out quite easily. This is how you can find 5 kilogram female horseshoe crabs in Delaware.
I really love to know how it feels to be that big . Imagine your perception of time and space if one were that large
for one, your reaction time would be slower, because it would take longer for chemical signals to reach your brain.
Globin347 Oh god, I am not even that big and already I'm very slow😹
Just hit thr gym, bro! 😎😎😎
Ask yo mama 😂😂😂
No, each being experiences time passing at same rate. You're confusing relativity (which is about relative time)
This channel is AMAZING. It explains things in such an unprecedented detail. Not even documentaries are such high quality!
It's so well presented, too. There are so many channels I never go back to because it's not organized or clunky.
"How Big Can Animals Get?"
I saw an ant once and thought, "Whooo.... That's pretty big."
Finally, a video that explains how the Square-Cube Law is relevant to size restrictions.
Definitely makes sense! Luckily we don't have foot long dragonflies roaming anymore 😬. Love the videos, keep up the good work!
Awesome content MLM, and your voice is the greatest on YT, well done. Very informative and relaxing at the same time.
This makes me wonder, if sauropods were somehow recreated, under a feeding regimen and with growth hormones, how much bigger could they get?
Awesome video. I really loved how you went through the different phylums of life explaining the different factors that makes them big or keeps them small. Really cool
Just stumbled upon this channel. I really like your calm tone and informative videos. Thank you for your effort!
Love your videos, they really chill me out and of course are very interesting.
Thanks a lot for uploading this - I never looked upon food availability as an absolute seize determining aspect within sauropod growth limits, though it's thus obvious.
This video was super fascinating ! Idk why I'm acting surprised though. I expect no less from you guys
Thank you
Great info . this is the second video I have watched of yours . I am subscribing . great stuff !
This video is so well made, definitely answered a long time question
Keep it up dude you’ll blow up soon
Hard to see otherwise with the quality of these vids 🇬🇧💪🏻
I'm a visitor to your channel (from E.D.G.E.), and just wanted to say that I enjoyed that. Nicely done.
You really, REALLY should have more views and subscribers. Your content is excellent and your voice is so damn calming.
You called milipedes insects 1:53 *Certefied Bra moment*
I was gonna comment the same thing.
What's that can you explain ?
@@jaisanatanrashtra7035 milipedes are there own subphylum together with centipedes . Insects are in fact much closer related to crustaceans. So it would make more sense to call crabs insects.
@@hailgiratinathetruegod7564 I would closer associate crabs with arachnids than insects
@@cavalryscout8720 well, I would associte horseshoecrabs wir crustaceans, but it woudn't change reality.
One of the more interesting videos on your channel.
If humans did grow to be so much bigger don't you think our bones would become more robust in the process? No animal evolves without these kinds of improvements. I'd love to see a comprehensive perspective on how large a human form could get.
There may be other planets or even stars out there can support that kind of fantastic ecosystem. Even if it was just at one time
Are you saying animals and plants can live in stars?
A lower gravity planet?
...Stars???
I am saying that. I’m basing my hypothesis after the fact we have examples of adaption here on earth. one is the Blob fish in the benthic communities in one of the deepest parts of the ocean where oxygen and other normal resources r scarce but potential. they may not be animals like ours but all the same, they have adapted. Some stars like our sun has small forms of bio life and places like Venus that have acid rain(potentially do underground if they haven’t adapted to the acid rain). There r also the opposite climate being moons like Europa that r popular for being highly potential to have life. It’s space and most of the giants or gas giants out there aren’t anything like earth(except in some minor areas). Gotta keep an open mind😁
@@Atari11000 You gotta get a better idea of just how extreme stars are. There is no comparison between a star and the bottom of the sea. The sea puts a good bit of pressure on you. Stars are incomprehensibly massive balls of nuclear reactions that heat up enough to vaporize functionally any matter in existence. They also create massive amounts of radiation, obviously. Not to mention the lack of any essential components to life, like water.
Cuantascopastenessaurus
God i love this channel and how the guy presents the information so clearly and easy to digest and at the same time can feel the passion he puts into the creation process (argentinian here so sorry for the grammar)
Great videos man
I'm pretty sure that whales became truly gigantic relatively recently after extinction of megalodon and start of the last ice age.
Actually...whales began to grow very large around 5 million years ago. Megalodon didn't go extinct until around 2.6 million years ago. So that is a significant overlap between the two. And this is well over 2 million years before the last ice age began.
@@Ispeakthetruthify 2 millions years are enough to get back to being small. Most of the whales are small anyway. They just found sweet spot when you can eat a lot and be big.
this channel is awesome
Imagine if penguins occupied the niche whales had. Imagine the size of those.
Also, imagine one crawling up on the beach to lay its eggs the way other birds do.
The book 'After Man' has a speculative creature called the Vortex, which is the largest animal on Earth and an ancestor of penguins :)
@@CHRB-nn6qp Yea, after 2 years I started to get into spec evo. But thanks for answering my guy.
A very interesting look at size. Thank you👍🦕🦕🦕👍
Goodness, that's such and interesting speculative world you noted at the end. Wonder what it would look like
Great video!
You should do a video on sauropod evolution in general from the weird Triassic sauropod-type animals to the late Cretaceous Titanosaurs like Argentinosaurus.
It sounds like there many have been a feedback loop with the large carnivors driving even larger herbivores who in turn required more and more vegetation which left less for medium sized herbivores and eventually created an opportunity for mamals to develop as a niche opened up for scavengers too small for the large carnivorous and developed warm blood trait to make being so small more viable.
I've been bingeing this channel recently, not sure if it's being promoted by the algorithm or not. I'm just here to mention that if I saw a meter long millipede I'd cry. That is all, have a good day👉👈
I would also cry. Have a good day, too.
Absence of chewing may have also played a role.
That is a good point not many people bring up with sauropods. Ornithischians and mammals chew their greens, size is similar in both groups.
Sauropods had a massive gut, did not waste time chewing so could take in more calories. Baleen whales take in far more calories than any terrestrial animal, thus their size.
This brings to mind a question: why the very top predators in marine ecosystems tend to be animals with lungs.
I think it's because there's a lot more oxygen in air than in water so air-breathing animals can have higher metabolisms. I also think breathing air makes an animal more resistant to the bends and therefore can dive/surface quickly. Charging up from the depths and trapping prey against the surface is a common hunting technique in the ocean.
rxg9er hate to correct you, but it’s more likely the opposite when it comes to diving or surfacing quickly. Air breathers, or anything with a gas pocket in its body, would need to rise slowly lest it explode from the gas pocket expanding too quickly from the rapid decrease in pressure. Sharks, on the other hand, having no lung or any gaseous organ, can rapidly accelerate up or down without much issue.
@@drsharkboy6568 Sharks do have an advantage there, I guess I was referring more to bony fish and their swim bladders. Since air-breathing tetrapods can't add any air to their lungs while at depth their lungs won't expand to be any bigger than their size at the surface.
Otodontid sharks (which handled competition from basilosaurids and even raptorial sperm whales just fine, and outlasted them both) would like a word with you.
intelligence is a major difference. the top whale predators being the odontoids (toothed whales) are super intelligent and some of them like orcas and dolphins are able to work together. i wouldn't call the filter feeders (mysticetes) top predators as they just kinda hang around
This channel alleviates my anxiety.
brilliantly written
Great video.
Thank you
I like this channel!😃
I'm really interested by what the eyes of certain species would look like. How can we tell? How much is guess work? Seems like youre kinda topic!
It has always blown my mind how large these animals are. There just isn't anything in this world that comes even remotely close to the size of these dinosaurs (including large theropods).
The largest land predator alive today is the polar bear, which is 1/10th the size of a T-Rex based on the lower end of the Rex weight estimates. Using the highest estimates for the Rex, the polar bear is 1/30th the size. Absolutely mind-blowing how large the dinosaurs became in their respective climaxes.
Blue Whale: Am I a joke to you?
One of the short faced bear species probably exceeded a metric ton. That's around the weight class of a lot of mid-sized predatory theropods.
One thing (of many) that I like about Sauropod's is that, in reality, they are just thumping great big cows!
I very much appreciate Moth Light Media, and at this point have watched every single video you have made. I also ordered a MLM hoodie about a week ago, but have yet to receive it. Does MLM’s merchandise take a while to arrive when one orders it, or must there be something wrong with my order?
I think it's also worth noting that a blue whale consists of a lot of body fat. Inert and energy conserving. A land animal will be more muscle, which needs constant maintenance (caloric drain)
I think had a flightless form of pterosaurs evolved they would have had an even greater potential to get even larger than Argentinosaurus for 2 reasons. 1) They had independently evolved air sacs earlier than birds thereby being even lighter proportionally than birds or dinosaurs. 2) A flightless pterosaur could have easily slipped into a similar niche as the giant condor relatives, specializing in scavenging the remains of large sea creatures that wash up dead on the coasts.
Imagine if penguins or pterosaurs occupied the niche whales had. Imagine the size of those.
Superb
Super interesting
The size sauropods reached ON LAND is a lot more impressive than the size whales have reached living in water.
Facts
Not really for me I am a big fan of the cenozoic than the Mesozoic and it's crazy to me that the largest animal to ever exist(that we know of)is. a mammal
It is the other way around, larger you are, less you need to eat, because you can survive on lover metabolic rate. It is also why smallest mammal eats most of food to body weight in animal world (and still cant compare to more active bacteria)
Are studying/teaching these subjects your hobby or your profession revolves around these?
The reason being warm blooded puts a limit on size is because not only does ittake alot of energy, but a bigger body is a better insulator, meaning heat would build up more and more the bigger a body is.
At a size only a little bit larger than Paraceratherium it is estimated that the temperature at the core of the animal would become too high and it would die, “cooking” itself to death.
Ayyy and there we are
Hope you enjoyed it
Speaking of large animals, here is an interesting animal size fact for you:
Considering the Heffalumps and Woozles from Winnie the Pooh, least weasels are the smallest member of their order Carnivora while African bush elephants are the biggest of their own order Proboscidea! In other words, they are the smallest and largest members of their corresponding orders! Fun fact!
I always see paraceratherium labeled as the largest land mammal but paleolexodon is a huge land mammal that was as big or bigger
Well paraceratherium is more unique but paleolexodon is just a big elephant 🐘🦏
thx
I remember seeing something about how metabolism isn't stagnant and does not grow linear with size, so I don't believe that food was actually a barrier with those massive creatures
so if the climate of mesozoic was cooler, egg laying mammals could have potentialy grown to sauropod sizes before Cretaceous/Paleogene extinction?
What...?
Maybe I think towards the end of the Triassic there was an elephant sized dicynodont that probably rivalled other sauropodomorphs
Most recent estimates put your average Argentinosaurus to be averaging 70 - 80 tons, with them being able to grow up to 90 tons in extreme cases. And whales also cheat on the weight thing, as more than HALF of their weight is just blubber, which means a skinny blue whale is closer to size to a sauropod.
Nice
Good question
Interesting. One point to maybe consider. If i know well, (some?) crocodiles are growing as long as they live. Could it be, that they just didnt live long enough to be even bigger?
Weren’t theropds warm blooded? Was it something that was unique to them among dinosaurs?
As a whole it's thought that only theropods (birds,) where warm-blooded but other dinosaurs were like crocodile cold blooded
2:33 why is this an issue though? Can't mammals just give birth to small youngs?
Non placental mammals do.
@Level Nine Drow 😃
@Level Nine Drow On a serious note, there actually was a giant carnivorous (thought to eat turtles) platypus in Miocene Australia.
@@bkjeong4302 giant in comparison to modern platypuses, but 1.5 meters isn't all that big
As mammals only have a few offspring, there is a greater need for each one to survive, so they need to be born big enough to not be totally useless, this is why most mammal young can walk and run very soon. Humans are kind of an exception since we care for the little useless potatos so well, but if they were any smaller, since we only have 1 at a timy usually, i mean we would probably lose them if they were the size of a chicken egg.
The CO2 levels were higher back so maybe the bioproduction was higher back then?
Also does animals not become larger unless pressured to? I thought it was more the other way around. After all larger individuals has an advantage over smaller so they should naturally become larger until reaching their limit as to compete within its own specie, right?
A theory yoou didn't mention: ornithischians, like mammals, chewed and grind their greens. This is how a lot of herbivores extract nutrients from food today.
Sauropods did not chew, they likely had highly acidic digestive system, so they did not waste their time chewing but just scrapped and swallowed.
Hollow bones are also structurally stronger than bones full of marrow or solid bones [like in penguins].
Also reason why ornithischians were about the same size as biggest land mammals.
@@ExtremeMadnessX yes good point. The biggest ornithischians were certain ornithopods which got as large as the largest elephantidae and as large as the biggest hornless rhinos, but not bigger
@@trvth1s Also people are so focused on sauropods that they just ignore that other dinosaurs didn't grow much bigger than biggest land mammals. Theropods grow big (for carnivores) because of same reason as sauropods (hollow bones and air sacks) but still in range of biggest land mammals.
@@ExtremeMadnessX yes, biggest theropod estimate was around 10 tons which is massive for a 2 legged animal, but 4 legged mammals and ornithischian la have gotten bigger
More Dinosaurs Please 😋😘❤️
Highly doubtful that the energy intake requirement would increase exponentially with size. Polynomial sounds much more plausible, e.g. I'm guessing energy intake would be proportional to some power of mass, where the exponent is probably relatively close to 1
I agree that the claimed exponential growing food requirement doesn't make sense.
When a body is scaled up in all three dimensions by the same ratio, it's volume grows in the third power of the scale factor. And so does its mass, if the body plan is unchanged except for the upscaling. And as the surface area grows only by the second power, it retains more heat / looses less. So a cubically growing energy requirement sounds more like an upper bound, and the exponential growth is really unlikely.
In reality, a body plan isn't just scaled up easily, but that hardly can make such a drastic difference as it is between x^3 and e^x.
Eight times as hungry as a half as long, high, and wide being is still a notably more food demanding.
Makes you wonder.....is there something larger waiting to be discovered? Johnholmezisaurus, perhaps?
Great
"how big can animals get?"
Sauropods: H E L L O
Learnt smthing new and worthy of chewing on for smtime... good
It's still entirely possible that they have not found the largest land animal to exist yet or individual of a species
I don't think a blank statement that no sauropods had parental care can be made. Some species had nests of hundred and more eggs where it makes sense they would lay them and leave them. But some had nesting colonies where the herds laid eggs together with only two dozen eggs. Multiple therapods have shown parental care for the nest and also for the young. It could be a breach between the sauropods and therapods in the saurischians but there are also ornithischians who show they stayed with their nest and took care of their young. Further in history we also see archosaurs where crocodiles guard their nest and take care of their young while pterosauria laid their eggs and left. It's only further between the archosaurs and the lepidosaurs there is the definitive branch where one side almost all the animals burry their eggs and leave them.
Soft shelled eggs have only been found for triassic and early jurassic dinosaurs. Current theory is that all early dinosaurs started with soft shelled eggs as their ancestors had but later 3 separate times dinosaurs evolved to hard shelled eggs in each of the sauropods, therapods and also the ornithischians. That still leaves discussion over post-birth care of the young but it says that in all 3 families the different species evolved to stay with the nests. By the time birds starting their egg laying, they were all hard shelled eggs and the parents stayed with their young to feed them.
What pressured this evolution to happen I haven't seen anything about. In birds there are large variations to how soon chicks get kicked out of the nest. While chicks that have to leave earlier always have worse survival chances, they still do it. The deciding factor seems to be the nesting place that certain bird species pick. Birds who build open nests push their young out a lot sooner than birds who make nests inside cracks or holes where predators can't reach. So with dinosaurs it could be the vastly different flora appearing during middle jurassic that gave the ability to go from hiding nests in largely wooded terrain to being able to hide your nest and yourself behind fast growing flower flora. As the survival chance for young increased, less eggs had to be laid over time. Or dinosaurs who would learn to "brood" their eggs, would slowly evolve their eggs favouring to get harder shells.
Why are animal sizes expressed in terms of weight? Wouldn't volume make more sense, especially since there are differences in density?
Huh. So Michael Crichton's guess of sauropods moving around super fast compared to being slow may have been correct.
How large could carnivore land mammals could get? I heard Arctotherium and Simbakubwa could be the largest carnivore mammals on land, but Andrewsarchus would probably be even bigger than both of them, but it's still unknown as it's discovered only a fragment of its giant, 3ft long skull.
Wait, why does the reasons for the size limit that land mammals have, such as regulation of body temperature, and giving birth to live young, not apply to water mammals?
Correction, the biggest land animal was bigassosauros
I've read that the massive size of whales is not due to predation pressure, since they evolved their biggest sizes after their extinction. But rather, climate change made it such that travelling enormous distances between krill rich areas was beneficial, and large size helps sustain those journeys.
Hi. I was wondering if you could help me. I'm working on project in which there's an alternate Earth where the gravity and density is much lower, yet oxygen levels are higher. Yes, insects are larger, but vary in size, but I wanted more large mammals compared to elephants and the Paracatherium. I also made a large carnivore that's big as a T-Rex. I'm familiar with the restrictions and advancements you know, but I didn't want to do reptiles, though there is one large species of reptile in it. Also, I have amphibians in the place of whales. I'd like to hear your opinion along with others who read this on how all those would be possible. Thank you.
If a human was scaled up to that size, they would cook from the inside
2:00 This may be incorrect. The giant elephant Palaeoloxodon namadicus may or may not have been larger than Paraceratherium, but in any case the two animals were of a similar size. Interestingly, Palaeoloxodon namadicus went extinct only 50 000 years ago. That means that modern humans saw what was possibly the largest land mammal to have ever existed (and if you buy into the overkill hypothesis, stone age hunters may have caused its extinction).
The genus Paleoloxodon may not be extinct either, the African forest elephant was in a recent paper grouped with the Paleoloxodon genus rather than the Loxodonta genus, making the the African savanna elephant the only member of its genus. If that is true we have higher diversity of elephants than we thought, three distinct genera, Paleoloxodon, Loxodonta and Elephas. Another option would be to group Paleoloxodon and Loxodonta into a single monophyletic genus. Others have pointed out that the African forest elephant may have arisen from hybridization events between Paleoloxodon and Loxodonta.
Great thanks 👳🚜🚜📽️🙏🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾👳🚜
imagine a carnivorous sauropod 😱
Terrifying
Imagine? Well many large plants eaters deer mose elephant horse gorilla eat meat search up horse eating chick and you see a video of a horse eating a chick every large herbivore eats meat for calcium because plants don't have calcium it's very likely sauropods did eat meat since it's unlikely plants would have calcium back then and they would need it to grow it's unlikely fully grown sauropods would actively hunt but like deer today it wouldn't pass up on a chance so you could be eaten by a sauropods if you were unlucky enough.
Dinosaurs may have been warm blooded like birds
Blue whale entered the chat.
"What's that about size?"
@Dino Boi lol
Could there have been a marine reptile larger than the blue whale ?
Another limitation of size comes from the limitation of lifetime. The limit of food that can be eaten and digested per day limits the weight gain and growth rate per day and therefore limits the weight and size an animal can reach during its lifetime.
I thought that there was a superabundance of plant matter for food for the gigantic sauropods and certainly in terms of available habitats for tetrapods and the Earth in the Jurassic Period and even in the Cretaceous Period was a considerably bigger planet than it is today as there was little to no polar freezing and more inland waterways but now I hear that there was less oxygen in the Jurassic Period than there is in the air of today which mystifies me but obviously the great sauropods could handle this well!
doesnt it also have to do with muscle attachments? mammals have proportionally smaller tails because our leg muscles attach to our pelvis while dinos have a lot of leg muscle attachment to their tail. Also the tail acts as a counter balance, since birds have insignificant tails, they wont have good counter balance at high weights like most non avian dinos
Hmm, so there could be a gigantic land animal if it was made like a hot air balloon..... Could you pop an argentinasaurus?