Do Thunderbeasts Prove Giant Animals Are Inevitable?
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Published 2023-10-24
The journey the thunder beasts took to reach such mega proportions from such humble beginnings forces us to ask an important question, one that paleontologists have been asking for more than a century: from an evolutionary perspective, is bigger always better?
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References:
docs.google.com/document/d/1wOeWY-9CpukvRvyKz4Z-fO…
All Comments (21)
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You can get the 2024 Eons calendar here! store.dftba.com/collections/eons
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It’s honestly really cool to think about how we’re living at the same time as the largest mammal (blue whale) and the smallest dinosaur (hummingbird) to ever exist!
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There is also a preservation bias towards large, thick-boned, animals. Animals below a certain size only leave traces under very specific conditions, their remains just don't last long enough for gradual burial.
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Hey PBS Eons crew, one suggestion: when you display the references, I recommend using the DOI link rather than the webpage. The reason is that the DOI is said to be 'eternal', while the journal webpage can change for multiple reasons. So by using the DOI link, in the future people will still be able to see the references. Great video!
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I think it can also be said that we're actually "giants" ourselves. When compared to most of the animal kingdom, we're actually pretty huge. Larger fauna like horses, cows, deers, elephants and other carnivores leave a striking impression to us and we feel that we're not all that large and powerful, but even when limited to just our own mammal kingdom we're one of the largest animals out there.
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It’s absolutely crazy to think at the same time we have one of largest animals ever to exist but we also have some of the smallest animals compared to other time periods
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I've recently come to think of 'therium' being the mammalian version of the dinosaur/reptile 'saurus'. These do well for naming any species of mammal or dinosaur in standard cases.
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Blake is such an incredible host. He covers the material is such an understandable way and has a great sense of humor. I got a good chuckle that Kallie made Blake say he says "Honey I shrunk the wife" when he didn't want to 😂 the whole team is so funny
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Big animals are niche specialists. Animals getting bigger until their niche collapses, then other animals grow and specilaize to fill it till the same thing happens again.
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Most people probably have heard Brontosaurus was really Apatosaurus, however a 2014 study found enough diagnostic characteristics to revive the genus, and it did so completely by accident. Not everyone agrees with this paper, but for now Brontosaurus is a distinct genus.
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Here's my theory according to many computer games regarding evolution I've played. Bigger is always better when the environment is stable, but if the environment changes there is a greater risk of sudden extinction. Smaller animals can usually adapt more quickly for various reasons, including that they almost always reproduce at a much higher rate.
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There's some element of preservation bias in the number of bigger animals in the record, plus some habitats in which larger sizes become a hinderance after a certain point are also very bad at producing the conditions for fossilisation. There's likely a whole bunch of sheep sized brontotheres that left no trace for example.
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Watching Blake crack himself up always kills me 🤣🤣🤣 especially when he laughs at sillier jokes than most of the other hosts but then pretends to be unmoved by their puns 🤣
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Edward Drinker Cope has had my favorite name I've heard in a while, I did not expect a video about him without anyone breaking out into laughter
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Being bigger allows the animals to enter ecological niches that would otherwise be impossible. Like being able to move heavy objects to gain access to food. The main drawback is that big animals are much more likely to go extinct during a long period of food scarcity.
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Personally I follow Cope's rule - but I'm also from such an ancient lineage that scrawny was in vogue, when I was young
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I think size is an “easy” thing for natural selection to make happen, but that smaller animals can out-compete them if they use social structures.
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Bigger than means required more resources to survived
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Thunder, Thunder, Thunder Beast!
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thunder beasts are really cool looking. they look like rhinos with strange horns.
