How did dinosaurs get so big?
To give the shortest possible answer: because they could. It may sound silly, but this is accurate to a point, the size of an animal is limited by the environment, and without limitations, it can and will grow unchecked. Obviously no such limitless environment exists on Earth, there are always such things to consider as food availability, gravity and oxygen. There are also certain advantages to being really big which may be causal to growing big or simply a beneficial side effect. Before I go into the reasons dinosaur were big, I must point out that most dinosaurs were not exceedingly big. Such iconic genera as Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Ankylosaurus, Anatotitan and Stegosaurus were no more massive than modern African bush elephants, some were even smaller! It’s only sauropods like Brachiosaurus, Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, and later the titanosaurs, that overgrew these limits. Even still, these dinosaurs never reached the calculated theoretical size limit for terrestrial animals (100 00
