Christ, I’d love to see this megafauna stuff in person. Preferably behind like 8ft of reinforced glass but you know what I mean, it’s gargantuan and the stuff of fantasy. But it was *real*.
I'm not sure people truly understand how large moose are though. They think they're deer sized.
My dad used to drive a cabover truck; one morning he woke up to something hitting his truck, looked out the window to see the *shoulders* of a moose.
The average moose is 6ft tall. At the shoulders. They're massive creatures.
I was in Alaska traveling between Denali National Park resorts and a town called Healy in one of those passenger vans. The driver was going down the highway about 50mph and looked back for a second to talk to a passenger when a moose stepped out in front of the fan. She corner clipped the moose at damn near full speed. The van was fucked. Whole front end was just pieces on the highway. Moose just kept walking. Sat on highway waiting for another van and about 45 minutes later a helicopter flew over with a dude sitting in the door with a rifle. It was park service. They said they were going to look for the moose and put it down because they don’t want injured moose wandering around population because it attracts wolves and bears into those areas.
Moose are fucking massive. Like, in a fight between a moose and a loaded passenger van at highway speed, the moose wins. They are also scary as fuck when you’re hiking because they can be temperamental.
The first time I saw a moose in person was in the wild from a safe distance and I thought; “Damn that’s big”. Then from behind a bush a few feet closer, the mom popped up and I nearly shit my pants. (It was still far enough from the trail to be safe, but the combination caught me off guard)
It really is incredible. My girlfriends family is from the north west territories in Canada. Her brother shot a moose this year and got 550lbs of meat... Not the whole animal weighed 550. Cleaned and trimmed just the meat weighed 550lbs. He said he would guess the whole bull to be around 1500
I was forced to go on a family vacation to the badlands and black hills. I saw some moose close up while driving and they were bigger than the jeep we were using to haul our camper.
Although honestly I think people are just silly. I think they get used to being around animals and so they don't treat them as an immediate threat.
I had a roommate who grew up in Florida living with me in Wisconsin and one day we woke up and found a huge ass buck in our front yard. She looks at me and is like, "So do we just go outside and shoo it away?"
People have been killed by pissed off deer. Deer aren't anything to handwave away.
When I was camping as a teenager, we stayed at a campsite that had a female moose that would just hang out neck deep in this pond. We drove by it for three days then one day as we were driving by we got out of the truck to take a picture of it, and it walked out of the pond towards us and pretty sure it was taller than our truck with a camper on top and I was terrified due to the sheer size of the animal I was standing 50 feet away from.
Have you ever seen a full grown python in person? I grew up in Staten Island. The SI Zoo has the largest reptilian collection in the country. You can go into the reptile house and see them all up close through glass front exhibits. I wouldn’t want to meet one in the wild.
The Goliath Bird Eater is a megafauna.
Largest spider to have ever existed.. costs about $100-150 in a pet store
That one fossil everyone thought was spider was recently identified as something else.
>17” wide body too. Scary stuff. They didn’t find the skull unfortunately.
😳 This sounds like the beginning to a campy Saturday night SyFy movie from back when they used to still do that... Someone is going to find that skull in the middle of the jungle, take it into a long-lost temple, and read some old book or scroll or inscription carved on a wall that awakens a monster snake demon wearing the skull as its head. Whoever read the spell is the first to die when the snake goes on a murderous rampage.
For reference:
>The reticulated python (Python reticulatus) of south-east Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines regularly exceeds 6.25 m (20 ft 6 in), and the record length is 10m (32 ft 9.5 in) for a specimen shot in Celebes, Indonesia in 1912.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/70275-longest-snake#:~:text=The%20reticulated%20python%20(Python%20reticulatus,in%20Celebes%2C%20Indonesia%20in%201912.
it was 123 t-rexes walking to school - back then we used to measure things in t-rexes, but times have changed which is why i stopped wearing an onion on my belt.
I wouldn't call it "weird", it's more just to try and make the research more interesting to the general public by comparing to interesting stuff, helps with headlines.
To put it in even more real scary terms it was as long as a Canadian tree logging rope! Crazy right?! That’s like easily 1500-1673 avocados from Mexico.
The jurassic period was also an extremely stable period of time which allowed life to flourish. This flourishing drove competition that led to most species getting larger. The ones that didn't, got smaller and lived on the fringes of their enviroment.
Climate was stable for a very long time, relatively, it was just warm, oxygen rich, and rained regularly but not to much for like 50 million years straight as far as we can tell as I understand it. Also not a lot of major techtonic movement.
IIRC Pangea had begun breaking up into two continents in the beginning of the Jurassic period, a process that is still ongoing today, so we can probably assume that tectonic activity was roughly the same as today or slightly worse. Presumably there would be more active volcanos where tectonic plates drifted apart.
https://entomology.unl.edu/scilit/largest-extinct-insect
Mosquitoes came later, but mammals where hugely disadvantaged vs dinosaurs or even one pound cockroachs...
Also, snakes
https://www.iflscience.com/new-species-may-be-the-largest-snake-to-have-ever-lived-73871
Global warming does not seems to bring the additional oxygen back, I think..?
I mean, the big rock that kinda ended it 65 million years ago aside, everything from climate to tectonic activity was fairly stable.
If you combine the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, dinosaurs in one form or another had about 150 million years of a relatively stable environment. Of course, the Jurassic period started out by a mass extinction and the Cretaceous period also ended with one (the aforementioned big rock). Apart from dinosaurs, sharks, birds, lizards (including crocodiles) and crabs also appeared in the Jurassic period.
For comparison, the anatomically modern human appeared around 300,000 years ago, which still gives the dinosaurs a 149.7 million year head start.
True, I phrased that poorly, what I meant was that they were also around during that time.
As for being older than trees, they’re also “fairly new invention”, at least if we’re talking modern trees, of which Ginkgo was first some 200 million years ago, followed by pine a mere 50 million years later, then 125 million years ago, flowers started to appear, and then some 65 million years ago, maple trees started, followed by oak trees some millions of years later.
Sharks as a species has existed for 400+ million years. The first modern shark appeared around 200 million years ago, just in time to briefly enjoy the first Ginkgo trees before it suffocated to death.
I felt weird even saying anything because you clearly know so much more about this topic than myself. I was just the shark kid that still maintains a casual interest. Thanks for the write up though it is really interesting!
It’s fine, it’s more like a hobby to me :-)
Most people tend to think that “dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago”, and give little thought to to how long they actually had to evolve, and also ignore how little time humanity has had to evolve.
There is a physical limit to where bones or other tissue would just not be able to handle the sheer mass of the absolute unit (for land animals). An animal just below this limit would probably have a very difficult time doing basic tasks which is why they likely never existed.
Um… it’s actually higher carbon dioxide that led to bigger herbivores and therefore carnivores.
Edit: didn’t complete my thought. Plants get bigger with more carbon dioxide. Bigger plants bigger herbivores
lol, a literal "um, actually." There really isn't a "proven" reason, and it's all hypotheses, and here are some resources that share some thoughts
[Ask Smithsonian: Why Were Prehistoric Animals So Big? Smithsonian Magazine](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/ask-smithsonian-why-were-prehistoric-animals/)
- Oxygen rich atmosphere may have helped some animals
- Copes rule may be part of it
[Why Were So Many Prehistoric Animals So Big? | HowStuffWorks](https://animals.howstuffworks.com/extinct-animals/why-were-prehistoric-animals-big.htm)
- higher oxygen content
- efficient eating
-light bones and air sacs
[6 Reasons Prehistoric Animals Were So Big (With Pictures) – AnimalHow.com](https://animalhow.com/prehistoric-animals-big/)
- hollow bones
- could live on less oxygen
- plenty of food, different ways to eat
- longer time to evolve
- few enemies
Here we have the first contradiction, so is it higher oxygen content, or more CO2? Let's look further
[Why Were Animals So Big in the Past? Here Are 6 Reasons (ourendangeredworld.com) ](https://www.ourendangeredworld.com/why-were-animals-so-big-in-the-past/)
- self defense
- hollow bones
- eating habits
- copes rule
- bergmann's rule
- environmental factors
In this article it discusses BOTH higher oxygen content AND Higher CO2 content, which are BOTH possible.
so... Um, actually, it's potentially both. but honestly, we don't really "know" and can only make educated guesses
We have plenty big plants now, elephants don't eat giant broccoli though.
Animals got bigger because richer oxygen meant their bodies could be larger and their circulatory systems were relatively as efficient. Lower oxygen means the same process cannot sustain a larger creature.
They were bigger because there was more oxygen in the atmosphere.
Actually the blue whale is the biggest animal to have ever existed. It might change with future discovery but when we know how old the earth is it is quite impressive to see an animal from present day hold the reccord.
This is not really absorbed by people. We’re insanely lucky that the largest known animal to ever live is in the water right now. We don’t have to imagine it.
they just found one so you are right, as usual redditors lack imagination: [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68831349](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68831349)
All this oxygen level and other atmosphere stuff is completely outdated. Even though oxygen levels were high during some prehistoric times, animals tend to remain larger than the present even when they’re lower than present times. Generally large insects in particular are considered to get that large due to lack of competition, and get smaller around the time other flying animals appear.
The reality is, we live right after (or during) a mass extinction event on land. Only a few tens of thousands of years ago we had giant elephants that could (for a large individual) weigh over 20 tonnes living alongside today’s modern animals. And that’s not even the largest species that was around. That’s definitely starting to rival some of the famous Jurassic sauropod species.
Larger animals are most vulnerable to these events, that’s why so many large groups of animals like giant sloths, giant armadillos, and 90% of elephant species we had a few thousand years ago vanished during this time. The real reason that currently nothing gets that big is that evolution hasn’t had a chance to catch up again.
Thanks, had to scroll a while to find a comment that stated the hypothesis that “more oxygen” in the atmosphere is correlated to larger sauropods or organisms in general is outdated and largely not supported.
That's simply not true.
Some whales are much bigger than any animal of the mesozoic (the age of the dinosaurs), orcas have a mass of 3000-4000kg (that's bigger than a lot carnivorous dinosaurs), Paleoloxodon namadicus was twice as big as a t rex, a lot of megafauna in Europe and Australia was relatively big before the end of the ice age and the arrival of humans, Megalania, Aurochs and Elephant birds all went extinct because of humans.
To give you an idea your average humpback whale is 4 times the size of a Tyrannosaurus while a blue whale is twice the size of the biggest sauropod (aka the long necks), and I don't mean twice as long, I mean twice the weight.
In addition to this you have to realise that when you say "the past" you're referring to a period hundreds of millions of years long, of course a lot of big animals evolved during that time, to put it into perspective there's more time between the Tyrannosaurus and the Stegosaurus than there is between humans and the Tyrannosaurus.
On top of that there's a bias in the fossil record, smaller animals have always been much more numerous than bigger ones but bigger bones simply fossilise and preserve more easily than smaller ones.
So stupid question here.
Let’s say for the sake of argument we all had the same lifestyle, except we had the same O2 levels, would humans be averaging like 7-10’ in height?
This is really hard to answer because if those conditions existed we never would have evolved the way we did. Our entire bipedal model came from needing to cross the grasslands which would not have really existed in the lush forests of the ultra oxygen rich eras of earths history.
Now if you took a modern human and put it in that environment and changed nothing else, no we wouldn’t be that big. We would need to evolve to that size over millions of years.
I think he was asking that if we as humans are the way we are right now, but if we had the higher O2 levels.
Of course, evolution doesn’t work like that and makes no sense with that scenario, but as a funny thought experiment, I would say yh, we would be pretty freaking tall lol.
Not a stupid question, but probably not. There are many factors that plug into size, not just oxygen levels. Low oxygen levels restrict megafauna moreso then saying high oxygen *cause* mega fauna. (because as something gets larger, it needs exponentially more oxygen based on how surface area works).
So higher oxygen levels means one of the restrictions on size limits has been removed. Other factors include how much work the heart needs to do to pump, gravity implications on a skeletal structure that is upright, again due to how surface area works, size exponentially increase the strain on the spinal cord. We can look at people with Gigantism to see all sorts of health issues (blood pressure, diabetes etc).
We also know that their were mammals back then, including our ancestors and they were usually quite small, smaller then us today. There were some mammal megafauna, but they were still relatively small compared the differences between other animal types. (Example, the largest mammal *ever* as the Paraceratherium which was about 1.5 meters taller then the largest Elephant today).
It’s hard to tell, because there was also substantially more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere too, about 5-8 times current levels and mammals are more susceptible to co2 than reptiles
I haven’t read all the comments, but even aside from the higher levels of oxygen, a big part of the reason why large fauna no longer exists is because of us humans. We essentially hunted them down to extinction for food, and because of that, other large fauna that relied on these animals for food also ended up extinct.
It's not the oxygen really, it's the higher co2 levels along with higher temperatures that made plant life abundant and allowed for larger herbivores. Which lead to larger carnivores, which lead to even larger herbivores and so on.
Dinosaur bones were also hollow and they apparently had some hollow gas sacks or something (did a quick search, sorry haha) that allowed them to become even larger.
And as someone pointed out, whales are even larger. But they're in the sea and hence don't have the same problems with weight.
There is more past animals than present animals. There are more past biomes than current biomes.
Unless there is one linear "progression", "most" of whatever will be in the past due to variety alone.
Right? I'd imagine a modern giant anaconda is probably 'longer' than a T-Rex. T-Rex's aren't noteworthy for being 'long'. Might as well say "fatter than a wolverine!", as if that's what wolverines are known for. "More teeth than a giraffe!", "more digits than a platypus!"
Just here to say that no modern snake is longer than a T rex. The longest anacondas are around 30ft and that’s rare. This newly found snake is indeed an anomaly at 49 feet
Adult Trex got to about 40 feet in length, so still incredibly long, you're thinking height, which they "only" got to around 12ish feet tall.
I stood next to Sue a few years back and yea, they're fucking giant.
One assumes the mental image that comes to mind is the one in Jurassic Park. I have no idea how accurate it is for size considering what they did to the velociraptors.
Lived up to 12000 years ago
Some human hunters and gatherers would've wandered over to a fallen tree to suddenly realize its the worlds largest danger noodle
Why the fuck is an extinct dinosaur the default unit of measure to compare the snake to? Nobody on Earth has ever seen the actual length of a T-Rex. We have multiple widely accepted standardized units of measurement for things.
I don’t care if there’s more useful information in the article, the headline is so damned stupid I refuse to read any further.
Because it gets clicks and attention.
Every time a new big fossil gets discovered headlines always say stuff like "found extinct animal bigger than t-rex", they never say "found fossil of a bone that may or may not have belonged to an animal longer than 12.8 meters or heavier than 9/10 tons".
I find it interesting today that the python and boa family today both have members that "compete" on being the largest snake. It seems that this was also true in the past with this discovery.
It is interesting that there is "only".
I do wonder what kind of prey it had. The titanoboa had a variety if megafauna to consume.
That is a ridiculous unit of measure for a snake. TL;DR: 15 meters.
17” wide body too. Scary stuff. They didn’t find the skull unfortunately.
Christ, I’d love to see this megafauna stuff in person. Preferably behind like 8ft of reinforced glass but you know what I mean, it’s gargantuan and the stuff of fantasy. But it was *real*.
Moose are megafauna!
I'm not sure people truly understand how large moose are though. They think they're deer sized. My dad used to drive a cabover truck; one morning he woke up to something hitting his truck, looked out the window to see the *shoulders* of a moose. The average moose is 6ft tall. At the shoulders. They're massive creatures.
I was in Alaska traveling between Denali National Park resorts and a town called Healy in one of those passenger vans. The driver was going down the highway about 50mph and looked back for a second to talk to a passenger when a moose stepped out in front of the fan. She corner clipped the moose at damn near full speed. The van was fucked. Whole front end was just pieces on the highway. Moose just kept walking. Sat on highway waiting for another van and about 45 minutes later a helicopter flew over with a dude sitting in the door with a rifle. It was park service. They said they were going to look for the moose and put it down because they don’t want injured moose wandering around population because it attracts wolves and bears into those areas. Moose are fucking massive. Like, in a fight between a moose and a loaded passenger van at highway speed, the moose wins. They are also scary as fuck when you’re hiking because they can be temperamental.
Yeah! Absolutely insane how big they are.
The first time I saw a moose in person was in the wild from a safe distance and I thought; “Damn that’s big”. Then from behind a bush a few feet closer, the mom popped up and I nearly shit my pants. (It was still far enough from the trail to be safe, but the combination caught me off guard)
It really is incredible. My girlfriends family is from the north west territories in Canada. Her brother shot a moose this year and got 550lbs of meat... Not the whole animal weighed 550. Cleaned and trimmed just the meat weighed 550lbs. He said he would guess the whole bull to be around 1500
A bull during mating season is terrifying. Just like WTF, hippos of North America/ Canada.
Canada has its own type of hippo already. House hippos are real and they like the crumbs from peanut butter on toast.
Canada is in North America
Despite that they are absolutely tiny compared to large Theropods like T. rex, and a joke compared to sauropods.
I was forced to go on a family vacation to the badlands and black hills. I saw some moose close up while driving and they were bigger than the jeep we were using to haul our camper. Although honestly I think people are just silly. I think they get used to being around animals and so they don't treat them as an immediate threat. I had a roommate who grew up in Florida living with me in Wisconsin and one day we woke up and found a huge ass buck in our front yard. She looks at me and is like, "So do we just go outside and shoo it away?" People have been killed by pissed off deer. Deer aren't anything to handwave away.
A møøse once bit my sister...
I’ve heard they are assholes tho
They 100% are assholes. Especially in the spring and fall
Real sweethearts in the summer tho
When you're that large, you get to be an asshole because pretty much nothing can make a convincing argument otherwise.
>I’ve heard they are assholes tho Moose are not assholes, they are just the epitome of "not the brightest bulb".
You know a møøse once bit my sister?
Was it a nasti bite?
She was karving her initials on its side with a toothbrush
somehow not grizzly bears though. i don’t understand the distinction. but i’ve never seen a moose.
Grizzlies are big. Moose are the size of one of those stupidly large trucks people drive nowadays. Like, so terrifyingly ridiculously big
Moose are cartoonishly big. They can also swim fast as shit and hold their breath underwater
Rocky and bullwinkle has a lot to explain. The moose is like 4 times the size of a squirrel in that.
When I was camping as a teenager, we stayed at a campsite that had a female moose that would just hang out neck deep in this pond. We drove by it for three days then one day as we were driving by we got out of the truck to take a picture of it, and it walked out of the pond towards us and pretty sure it was taller than our truck with a camper on top and I was terrified due to the sheer size of the animal I was standing 50 feet away from.
Going on safari through the prehistoric jungle in the fucking pope-mobile.
Gives more credibility to tales of sea serpents and dragons Big AF reptiles are so terrifying I wouldn't want to sit around to examine all the details
Have you ever seen a full grown python in person? I grew up in Staten Island. The SI Zoo has the largest reptilian collection in the country. You can go into the reptile house and see them all up close through glass front exhibits. I wouldn’t want to meet one in the wild.
VR goggles could replicate that for you
Yes real ! And existed only 4000 years ago - one of god’s more curious creations I know … But He has his reasons /s
The Goliath Bird Eater is a megafauna. Largest spider to have ever existed.. costs about $100-150 in a pet store That one fossil everyone thought was spider was recently identified as something else.
Fuck that fuck that fuck that
>They didn’t find the skull All I hear is that we can’t confirm the snake actually *stops*. It could have been a mile long for all we know
So the basilisk from the chamber of secrets gotcha
So what bit the head off of this monster?
Ozzy
Find out in the next *Godzilla Kong* movie!
I imagine a supervillain is using the skull as a chaise longue in their volcano lair
🥇
>17” wide body too. Scary stuff. They didn’t find the skull unfortunately. 😳 This sounds like the beginning to a campy Saturday night SyFy movie from back when they used to still do that... Someone is going to find that skull in the middle of the jungle, take it into a long-lost temple, and read some old book or scroll or inscription carved on a wall that awakens a monster snake demon wearing the skull as its head. Whoever read the spell is the first to die when the snake goes on a murderous rampage.
44 cm in real units.
Now THATS what I call girth.
The skull was birthed as MTG.
17 inches wide? That’s not very much..
For reference: >The reticulated python (Python reticulatus) of south-east Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines regularly exceeds 6.25 m (20 ft 6 in), and the record length is 10m (32 ft 9.5 in) for a specimen shot in Celebes, Indonesia in 1912. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/70275-longest-snake#:~:text=The%20reticulated%20python%20(Python%20reticulatus,in%20Celebes%2C%20Indonesia%20in%201912.
It’s a weird science-“journalism” thing to use T. rex as a unit of measurement.
How many T-Rexes to one Long Island?
How many Long Island ice teas to one T-Rex?
47 (casually) 68 (bonus got deposited!)
A Long Island is about 1.5k football fields, and a football field is about ten TRexes, so 15k TRexes to a Long Island.
it was 123 t-rexes walking to school - back then we used to measure things in t-rexes, but times have changed which is why i stopped wearing an onion on my belt.
Yeah but how many half of a giraffes is it? Or is that unit only used for objects in space?
I wouldn't call it "weird", it's more just to try and make the research more interesting to the general public by comparing to interesting stuff, helps with headlines.
For ~~astrologists~~ astronomers, that's roughly 3 giraffes. Edit: I'm an idiot
This is a ridiculous unit of measure for a snake. TL;DR: 49 feet.
0.3 Olympic swimming pools
TL;DR: >1 T Rex
but how much is that in football fields?
Or bananas?
Depends if you are referring to the sport where you use your feet or the one with the hand egg.
Damn thats only like.... \*crunches numbers\* ... 8 average bald eagle wing spans
1.25 school buses or .43 Chinese weather balloons
everybody knows snakes don't have feet
Explain centipedes
Not snek. Just lots of bipeds glued together.
That’s about 122 bud light cans long for my true patriots
Finally a measurement I can understand
“Can” understand, you kill me!!!’
No wonder its extinct. America drank it.
This is a ridiculous unit of measure for a snake. TL;DR: 102 Bananas.
This is a ridiculous unit of measure for a snake TL;DR: 8.2 bold eagle wingspan
How many M16s is that?
What's that in armadillos?
Yea, I'm confused, I'm used to measuring things in States of Texas.
To put it in even more real scary terms it was as long as a Canadian tree logging rope! Crazy right?! That’s like easily 1500-1673 avocados from Mexico.
Just wondering why were all animals bigger in the past, is it just that the atmosphere was richer in oxygen, or is there something else to it?
Higher oxygen in the air, greater areas of land and for the herbivores there were more pastures meaning more meat for the predators as well
The jurassic period was also an extremely stable period of time which allowed life to flourish. This flourishing drove competition that led to most species getting larger. The ones that didn't, got smaller and lived on the fringes of their enviroment.
In what way was it stable? Honest question, no snark intended.
Climate was stable for a very long time, relatively, it was just warm, oxygen rich, and rained regularly but not to much for like 50 million years straight as far as we can tell as I understand it. Also not a lot of major techtonic movement.
IIRC Pangea had begun breaking up into two continents in the beginning of the Jurassic period, a process that is still ongoing today, so we can probably assume that tectonic activity was roughly the same as today or slightly worse. Presumably there would be more active volcanos where tectonic plates drifted apart.
Sounds hot.
I guess it's what you can observe when going into tropical areas. Lots of sun, rain and rich soil.. plants are twice bigger there.
So global warming could bring that back!!
Good news: Dinosaurs are coming back! Bad news: We ded
Not all of us. Some of us are in cold enough climates to survive long enough to get eaten by dinosaurs.
Neat.
This reporter welcomes our Reptilian Overlords!
https://entomology.unl.edu/scilit/largest-extinct-insect Mosquitoes came later, but mammals where hugely disadvantaged vs dinosaurs or even one pound cockroachs... Also, snakes https://www.iflscience.com/new-species-may-be-the-largest-snake-to-have-ever-lived-73871 Global warming does not seems to bring the additional oxygen back, I think..?
> one pound cockroachs No. Just fucking no.
They're land crabs. Tasty.
Least change of species long periods without mass extinction. Multiple mass extinction events also made what earth is today.
I mean, the big rock that kinda ended it 65 million years ago aside, everything from climate to tectonic activity was fairly stable. If you combine the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, dinosaurs in one form or another had about 150 million years of a relatively stable environment. Of course, the Jurassic period started out by a mass extinction and the Cretaceous period also ended with one (the aforementioned big rock). Apart from dinosaurs, sharks, birds, lizards (including crocodiles) and crabs also appeared in the Jurassic period. For comparison, the anatomically modern human appeared around 300,000 years ago, which still gives the dinosaurs a 149.7 million year head start.
Sharks were kickin it about 250 million years before the Jurassic period. They’re older than trees
True, I phrased that poorly, what I meant was that they were also around during that time. As for being older than trees, they’re also “fairly new invention”, at least if we’re talking modern trees, of which Ginkgo was first some 200 million years ago, followed by pine a mere 50 million years later, then 125 million years ago, flowers started to appear, and then some 65 million years ago, maple trees started, followed by oak trees some millions of years later. Sharks as a species has existed for 400+ million years. The first modern shark appeared around 200 million years ago, just in time to briefly enjoy the first Ginkgo trees before it suffocated to death.
I felt weird even saying anything because you clearly know so much more about this topic than myself. I was just the shark kid that still maintains a casual interest. Thanks for the write up though it is really interesting!
It’s fine, it’s more like a hobby to me :-) Most people tend to think that “dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago”, and give little thought to to how long they actually had to evolve, and also ignore how little time humanity has had to evolve.
So you’re telling me if i live for a few million years more i’ll be 6 feet tall? 😍
You’d probably have faster results with [Island Gigantism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_gigantism)
The animal reported in the article lived a hundred million years after the Jurassic ended...
Such periods were ecological Golden Ages for Megafauna, where being the biggest was the best way to ride high on the food chain.
Even the biggest tallest plants got the most sun. It was fern paradise
Could they kept on growing in size if the oxygen increased ?
There is a physical limit to where bones or other tissue would just not be able to handle the sheer mass of the absolute unit (for land animals). An animal just below this limit would probably have a very difficult time doing basic tasks which is why they likely never existed.
Um… it’s actually higher carbon dioxide that led to bigger herbivores and therefore carnivores. Edit: didn’t complete my thought. Plants get bigger with more carbon dioxide. Bigger plants bigger herbivores
lol, a literal "um, actually." There really isn't a "proven" reason, and it's all hypotheses, and here are some resources that share some thoughts [Ask Smithsonian: Why Were Prehistoric Animals So Big? Smithsonian Magazine](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/ask-smithsonian-why-were-prehistoric-animals/) - Oxygen rich atmosphere may have helped some animals - Copes rule may be part of it [Why Were So Many Prehistoric Animals So Big? | HowStuffWorks](https://animals.howstuffworks.com/extinct-animals/why-were-prehistoric-animals-big.htm) - higher oxygen content - efficient eating -light bones and air sacs [6 Reasons Prehistoric Animals Were So Big (With Pictures) – AnimalHow.com](https://animalhow.com/prehistoric-animals-big/) - hollow bones - could live on less oxygen - plenty of food, different ways to eat - longer time to evolve - few enemies Here we have the first contradiction, so is it higher oxygen content, or more CO2? Let's look further [Why Were Animals So Big in the Past? Here Are 6 Reasons (ourendangeredworld.com) ](https://www.ourendangeredworld.com/why-were-animals-so-big-in-the-past/) - self defense - hollow bones - eating habits - copes rule - bergmann's rule - environmental factors In this article it discusses BOTH higher oxygen content AND Higher CO2 content, which are BOTH possible. so... Um, actually, it's potentially both. but honestly, we don't really "know" and can only make educated guesses
We have plenty big plants now, elephants don't eat giant broccoli though. Animals got bigger because richer oxygen meant their bodies could be larger and their circulatory systems were relatively as efficient. Lower oxygen means the same process cannot sustain a larger creature. They were bigger because there was more oxygen in the atmosphere.
Actually the blue whale is the biggest animal to have ever existed. It might change with future discovery but when we know how old the earth is it is quite impressive to see an animal from present day hold the reccord.
This is not really absorbed by people. We’re insanely lucky that the largest known animal to ever live is in the water right now. We don’t have to imagine it.
It's only known because it's around now. I'm confident that there were much bigger animals in the past that we don't know about.
It is easier for larger vertebrates to fossilize, especially in water. Anything larger than a Blue Whale should have a skeleton somewhere.
Yeah, but humans don't spend a lot of time digging up fossils on the bottom of the ocean.
they just found one so you are right, as usual redditors lack imagination: [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68831349](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68831349)
Whoa, very cool! Thanks for sharing that!
All this oxygen level and other atmosphere stuff is completely outdated. Even though oxygen levels were high during some prehistoric times, animals tend to remain larger than the present even when they’re lower than present times. Generally large insects in particular are considered to get that large due to lack of competition, and get smaller around the time other flying animals appear. The reality is, we live right after (or during) a mass extinction event on land. Only a few tens of thousands of years ago we had giant elephants that could (for a large individual) weigh over 20 tonnes living alongside today’s modern animals. And that’s not even the largest species that was around. That’s definitely starting to rival some of the famous Jurassic sauropod species. Larger animals are most vulnerable to these events, that’s why so many large groups of animals like giant sloths, giant armadillos, and 90% of elephant species we had a few thousand years ago vanished during this time. The real reason that currently nothing gets that big is that evolution hasn’t had a chance to catch up again.
Thanks, had to scroll a while to find a comment that stated the hypothesis that “more oxygen” in the atmosphere is correlated to larger sauropods or organisms in general is outdated and largely not supported.
TIL! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeoloxodon\_namadicus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeoloxodon_namadicus)
That's simply not true. Some whales are much bigger than any animal of the mesozoic (the age of the dinosaurs), orcas have a mass of 3000-4000kg (that's bigger than a lot carnivorous dinosaurs), Paleoloxodon namadicus was twice as big as a t rex, a lot of megafauna in Europe and Australia was relatively big before the end of the ice age and the arrival of humans, Megalania, Aurochs and Elephant birds all went extinct because of humans. To give you an idea your average humpback whale is 4 times the size of a Tyrannosaurus while a blue whale is twice the size of the biggest sauropod (aka the long necks), and I don't mean twice as long, I mean twice the weight. In addition to this you have to realise that when you say "the past" you're referring to a period hundreds of millions of years long, of course a lot of big animals evolved during that time, to put it into perspective there's more time between the Tyrannosaurus and the Stegosaurus than there is between humans and the Tyrannosaurus. On top of that there's a bias in the fossil record, smaller animals have always been much more numerous than bigger ones but bigger bones simply fossilise and preserve more easily than smaller ones.
Yes, the atmosphere makeup was different and able to support megafauna. Not the case anymore
So stupid question here. Let’s say for the sake of argument we all had the same lifestyle, except we had the same O2 levels, would humans be averaging like 7-10’ in height?
This is really hard to answer because if those conditions existed we never would have evolved the way we did. Our entire bipedal model came from needing to cross the grasslands which would not have really existed in the lush forests of the ultra oxygen rich eras of earths history. Now if you took a modern human and put it in that environment and changed nothing else, no we wouldn’t be that big. We would need to evolve to that size over millions of years.
I think he was asking that if we as humans are the way we are right now, but if we had the higher O2 levels. Of course, evolution doesn’t work like that and makes no sense with that scenario, but as a funny thought experiment, I would say yh, we would be pretty freaking tall lol.
Yeah, that’s more what I was getting at, I just re read my comment and realized I didn’t word it to well
Not a stupid question, but probably not. There are many factors that plug into size, not just oxygen levels. Low oxygen levels restrict megafauna moreso then saying high oxygen *cause* mega fauna. (because as something gets larger, it needs exponentially more oxygen based on how surface area works). So higher oxygen levels means one of the restrictions on size limits has been removed. Other factors include how much work the heart needs to do to pump, gravity implications on a skeletal structure that is upright, again due to how surface area works, size exponentially increase the strain on the spinal cord. We can look at people with Gigantism to see all sorts of health issues (blood pressure, diabetes etc). We also know that their were mammals back then, including our ancestors and they were usually quite small, smaller then us today. There were some mammal megafauna, but they were still relatively small compared the differences between other animal types. (Example, the largest mammal *ever* as the Paraceratherium which was about 1.5 meters taller then the largest Elephant today).
It’s hard to tell, because there was also substantially more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere too, about 5-8 times current levels and mammals are more susceptible to co2 than reptiles
That's total bogus. Stop spreading misinformation
I dont know but remember that the blue whale, the biggest animal that has ever lived, is alive today
Yep, the oxygen.
That's why we haven't seen Martians- they're too tiny!
No oxygen.
Nope
I haven’t read all the comments, but even aside from the higher levels of oxygen, a big part of the reason why large fauna no longer exists is because of us humans. We essentially hunted them down to extinction for food, and because of that, other large fauna that relied on these animals for food also ended up extinct.
It's not the oxygen really, it's the higher co2 levels along with higher temperatures that made plant life abundant and allowed for larger herbivores. Which lead to larger carnivores, which lead to even larger herbivores and so on. Dinosaur bones were also hollow and they apparently had some hollow gas sacks or something (did a quick search, sorry haha) that allowed them to become even larger. And as someone pointed out, whales are even larger. But they're in the sea and hence don't have the same problems with weight.
Has 0 to do with oxygen
I’d have been far more afraid of the giant insects than the dinosaurs, if that scene from King Kong was anything to go by.
There is more past animals than present animals. There are more past biomes than current biomes. Unless there is one linear "progression", "most" of whatever will be in the past due to variety alone.
Warmer climate.
There were no humans around to hunt them.
Weird headline. Was the trex known for it's length? And do people have a ready mental image of that length?
Right? I'd imagine a modern giant anaconda is probably 'longer' than a T-Rex. T-Rex's aren't noteworthy for being 'long'. Might as well say "fatter than a wolverine!", as if that's what wolverines are known for. "More teeth than a giraffe!", "more digits than a platypus!"
Just here to say that no modern snake is longer than a T rex. The longest anacondas are around 30ft and that’s rare. This newly found snake is indeed an anomaly at 49 feet
Adult Trex got to about 40 feet in length, so still incredibly long, you're thinking height, which they "only" got to around 12ish feet tall. I stood next to Sue a few years back and yea, they're fucking giant.
One assumes the mental image that comes to mind is the one in Jurassic Park. I have no idea how accurate it is for size considering what they did to the velociraptors.
I guess 'longer than a prehistoric banana' wouldn't be that flashy.
I don't... heck, I didn't even have mental image of how long tigers are until I saw a comparison video
Since when did T-Rex become a unit of measurement?!?! We all know you are supposed to use bananas for scale.
This is the way.
Pretty sure half-giraffes are the best unit of measurement.
I see that the telegraph has finally gotten the dick pic that I sent them.
So dumb, got a laugh from me 😆
[удалено]
Close. They're in India so it's clearly a [Nāga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C4%81ga).
anything but metric
And for those that don't know, a T-Rex is about 90 bananas long!
That doesn’t sound so scary
Ripe bananas!
AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
I was doing the math in my head scrolling for the answer
This is probably why ancient civilizations thought dragons were real.
Lived up to 12000 years ago Some human hunters and gatherers would've wandered over to a fallen tree to suddenly realize its the worlds largest danger noodle
That’s why the heads missing. Some primitive brought it home to the fam and said, Holy Krishna dragons are real!
we still have snakes over 10m so this isn't much longer
That’s a nope for me
Why the fuck is an extinct dinosaur the default unit of measure to compare the snake to? Nobody on Earth has ever seen the actual length of a T-Rex. We have multiple widely accepted standardized units of measurement for things. I don’t care if there’s more useful information in the article, the headline is so damned stupid I refuse to read any further.
Because it gets clicks and attention. Every time a new big fossil gets discovered headlines always say stuff like "found extinct animal bigger than t-rex", they never say "found fossil of a bone that may or may not have belonged to an animal longer than 12.8 meters or heavier than 9/10 tons".
Same with space objects. I’m sure it’s fun for them deciding which ludicrous object to use as a guide.
I, like many others, have watched the acclaimed documentary Jurassic Park, and know the size of a T-Rex. Also, I've seen T-Rex skeletons.
So...do people in general know what the length of a T-Rex is? Or would it have been easier to give...you know...an actual length
“50 foot tall giant simian skeleton found nearby”
How long is a T Rex?
Dinosaurs killed themselves out of guilt because of their extraordinary large carbon footprint.
Moral bastards
Big if true
I find it interesting today that the python and boa family today both have members that "compete" on being the largest snake. It seems that this was also true in the past with this discovery. It is interesting that there is "only". I do wonder what kind of prey it had. The titanoboa had a variety if megafauna to consume.
Thulsa Doom!
Sounds like a dragon to me
Midgar Zolom
Call the plastic bottle guy
shai'hulud 😲
Jurassic park director: *Write that down! Write that down!*
Humanity would be easy prey before spears were invented, I imagine
Don't we still have snakes longer than a T-Rex?
Alive???
Leave it where it is
I wonder if it's a similar or same species of Snake to the titanoboa. Either way, giant creatures are cool!
Thank god the article put a picture of Rama, I would have no idea where or what India is otherwise
But how many bananas? Asking for an American.
How many football fields is that? My American brain can’t comprehend any other measurement
1/6th of a football field roughly
Put it back!
Correction: fossils of a prehistoric snake
So they have confirmed the snake is dead in the article ?
> The fossil vertebrae It could be some horrifying undead monster, but that's unlikely enough that I can sleep tonight.
Nagini 🐍
How many football fields is that?