Why Did Dinosaurs Get So Big?

Sauropods are the biggest dinosaurs and dwarves, even the largest land mammal, Paraceratherium. There are many theories, such as dinosaur size being fueled by vegetation. Carbon dioxide was much more abundant in the atmosphere during the Mesozoic, including the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Increased carbon dioxide increases the global temperature. The global climate was much warmer millions of years ago than today.

The high carbon dioxide levels meant that plants had to recycle more and more carbon dioxide. Thus the world was full of many types of vegetation. From the Jurassic to the Cretaceous Periods, dinosaurs like Supersaurus, Sauroposeidon, and Argentinosaurus shook the Earth. How did they get to be so big? Why did we mammals never even come close to dinosaurs in size?

Why did Dinosaurs get so big? (Size evolution)

The evolution of large body sizes in dinosaurs is a topic that has fascinated scientists for many years. Several factors are thought to have contributed to the impressive size of some dinosaur species. Here are some key reasons why dinosaurs evolved to be so large:

Ecological Opportunities: The evolution of large body size in dinosaurs was likely driven, in part, by the availability of ecological niches and abundant resources. Large herbivorous dinosaurs could exploit a wide range of plant resources, taking advantage of the vast vegetation available during the Mesozoic Era. In turn, carnivorous dinosaurs grew larger to prey upon these large herbivores.

Thermoregulation: The large size of certain dinosaur species, such as the long-necked sauropods, may have facilitated more efficient thermoregulation. The large body mass of these dinosaurs helped them retain heat, which would have been advantageous in maintaining a stable body temperature in various environments, including colder regions or during cooler times of the day.

Predatory Advantage: Being large could provide advantages for carnivorous dinosaurs. Larger body size potentially increased their strength, agility, and ability to capture and subdue prey. It also allowed for consuming more food, potentially reducing competition with other predators.

Reduced Predation Risk: Larger size may have provided some protection against predators. For example, certain dinosaurs’ massive size and armor, like the ankylosaurs or stegosaurs, acted as defensive adaptations against predators, making them less vulnerable to attacks.

Evolutionary Legacy: Once larger body sizes evolved in certain dinosaur lineages, it may have influenced subsequent generations. Large size became a characteristic of those lineages, and natural selection could have favored individuals with larger body sizes, leading to a continuation and amplification of the trend over time.

The most massive animal ever is a mammal: the blue whale. It can get up to 30 meters long and weigh 145 metric tons, more than twice as heavy as the most massive known dinosaur. But, to be fair, the rules of biomechanics are different in the water. Buoyancy and fat can do amazing things, allowing sea creatures to grow sizes that would be impossible on land. However, mammals never competed with the non-avian dinosaurs for the largest terrestrial animals.

There’s always some debate about what the biggest dinosaur was. But the current record holder for the largest specimen belongs to the newly-named titanosaur Patagotitan. Experts estimate that this Cretaceous herbivore stretched over 36 and a half meters and weighed upward of 64 metric tons.

By contrast, the biggest mammal ever walking on the land was the hornless rhinoceros, Paraceratherium. It weighed 15 tons and stood about 5 meters high at the shoulder, roaming Eurasia from Romania to China. At the end of the Oligocene Epoch, long after, the non-avian dinosaurs disappeared.

So, how can two such successful and prolific types of animals end up having such different size constraints? Part of it might have to do with how they reproduced. Paraceratherium was a placental mammal. It means that it gestated its young inside its body. If this ancient rhino were like the large mammals alive today, that would’ve taken a long time. Big mammals like giraffes, rhinos, and elephants usually have only one offspring at a time. Gestation can last longer than some other kinds of animals live.

Elephants, for example, carry their babies for more than two years! Now consider the dinosaurs. They didn’t have to take their babies because all dinosaurs laid eggs. Even the biggest of the giant dinos hatched from an egg no bigger than a soccer ball. What does this have to do with size? More giant mammal species give birth to bigger young. It requires a huge amount of time and energy to gestate. Dinosaurs bypassed that problem.

Instead of having bigger babies, the largest dinosaurs laid comparatively small eggs, holding equally small hatchlings. Reproducing this way with babies hatching and growing outside the mother’s body removed the size limits that gestation places on mammals. Dinosaurs also had another evolutionary advantage. Their skeletons had a special feature that mammals lacked: a sophisticated system of air sacs.

These sacs were pockets of soft tissue that were connected to the lungs. Think of them as biological balloons. Some of these sacs sat in the body cavity, next to bones, usually in the neck, back, and hips. But others ran inside the bones themselves. These air sacs helped shape the dinosaur’s skeleton and allowed the bones of the biggest dinosaurs to remain light without sacrificing strength.

How do we know that extinct dinosaurs had these sacs? Partly because non-extinct dinosaurs have them too! Birds have similar sacs that help draw air into their tiny lungs while also making their skeletons remarkably light. The respiratory system of birds compared to the giant dinos is pretty striking. In sauropods, for example, the neck and back vertebrae have the same pockets where the air sacs are attached.

When paleontologists scan fossils of some dinosaur bones, like vertebrae, they often find hollow spaces inside the bones where the air sacs used to sit. Remember that bones with spaces created by air sacs differ from hollow bones.

Not all of the extinct dinosaurs had these handy airbags. Only the type of dinos known as saurischians had them. In the traditional dinosaur family tree, this group encompasses the theropods, the two-legged dinosaurs that include today’s birds. The sauropods and the quadrupeds include the giant titanosaurs.

Like the horned, armored, and duckbilled dinosaurs, all dinosaurs are known as ornithischians. They didn’t have these features. So they weren’t as light on their feet. Mammals don’t have anything like them, either. We retain a skeletal system of dense, heavy bones that limit how big we can get before our bones crack under our weight. But the thing is, these adaptations allowed dinosaurs to get so big. They don’t tell us why these giants all got so enormous in the first place! That’s a different evolutionary question with lots of possible answers.

• Maybe living large was a way to stay safe from predators. Or maybe their size allowed dinosaurs to cover more ground or reach higher leafy branches in search of food. Or maybe there is something paleontologists haven’t thought of yet.

Another question to consider: Was the ability to grow so large an advantage? After all, the sauropods are gone. So are most of their relatives. Only a single group of saurischian theropods survive the entire dinosaur family. They range in size from the hummingbird to the ostrich. Evolutionarily speaking, it seems that bigger is not always better.

How did Dinosaurs evolve to become so huge?

Dinosaurs, especially herbivores, may have evolved to massive sizes because many plants were to eat. Bigger sauropods mean bigger prey. This means that carnivores possibly evolved to eat these massive herbivores. When they killed and ate herbivores, they ate more food. The herbivores were big with the process.

Another theory is that dinosaurs grew to massive sizes for protection and self-defense. Gigantism is an evolutionary advantage and gives dinosaurs immunity to predators and protection. It also brought disadvantages, such as slow speed and the need for limited population size. Massive Dinosaur size is a side effect of cold-bloodedness. Most paleontologists who study sauropods regard it as true that sauropods were cold-blooded because of two convincing arguments.

• First, a warm-blooded sauropod would’ve baked itself completely based on physiological models.
• Second, no warm-blooded mammals such as Elephants, Giraffes, or Zebras come close to the size of sauropods.

Scientists believe that if a sauropod evolved to sizes big enough, it would have achieved the quote-unquote “homeothermy” or the capacity to preserve its interior temperature regardless of its environment’s conditions. Argentinosaurus would warm up slowly in the sun during the day. It cools down also at a slow pace at night, giving it an average body temperature. A small reptile in the same conditions would be at the mercy of the environmental temperature on an hour-by-hour basis.

During the late Triassic and early Jurassic, the Protosauropda, the forerunners, were small. Some were bipedal, like modern birds, walking on their hind legs. Like Eoraptor and Anchisaurus, these little dinosaurs were not much bigger than a fox-terrier, and some, like Plateosaurus, reached donkey sizes.

However, natural selection made these dinosaurs larger during the Middle Jurassic. This selection came from carnivorous dinosaurs becoming more formidable during the late Triassic and early Jurassic.

While the bird-hipped ornithischian dinosaurs developed armor and horns, the Sauropod dinosaurs increased. The larger one, the less likely a predator would take it for fear of getting squashed. The faster it grew, the better it was at surviving into adulthood and reproducing. This natural selection by predators put pressure on these dinosaurs gigantic from about 190 to 170 million years ago.

Dinosaurs started walking on all four legs and gave up grasping their hands for gripping and defense. These forearms and hands also become pillar-like to support the increasing weight of a larger body. The paleontology is that their limbs become graviportal. The bones became thicker, and the foot reinforced the increasing weight.

The dinosaurs also adopted a digitigrade stance, meaning they supported more of the weight using their fingers, rather than a plantigrade stance, in which the ankle bears the weight. This pillar-like support upon the fingers gives the body’s weight strong beam-like support for an increasingly heavy creature.

These giant dinosaurs supported their weight with their digits in the hindfoot yet retained large claws on their first digit or big toe. These claws were likely helpful in scratching and gripping irregular surfaces as they walked. These gigantic sauropod dinosaurs had a secret increasing body volume yet maintaining less dense and lighter body weight. It has to do with their long necks.

Sauropod dinosaurs have cervical vertebrae that are very complex, with large open spaces between the bones and large processes that extend from the centrum. Even the centrum is hollowed out with spaces called Pleurocoels. Along the sides of the vertebrae are spaces within the bone called Pneumatic foramina.

In life, these spaces would be filled with air sacs. The birds also need to lighten their skeletons, and they do this by expanding out an air sac system from the lungs. This air sac system in birds is called a unidirectional respiration system. This respiration system is much more effective in providing a steady source of oxygen to the lungs.

They are increasing most of their body size through these air-filled cavities. Thus these dinosaurs were like balloon-filled floats in a Macy’s Day parade. Mostly air in these long necks, allowing these dinosaurs to get enormous. This scaffolding of bone is all that remains. The complexity of processes and apophysis gives the enormous necks of sauropods characteristic of natural engineering. That amazes and confounds paleontologists trying to reconstruct these gigantic creatures today.

Why aren’t modern animals as large as Dinosaurs?

The American Museum of Natural History has a cast of a titanosaur that’s so big. It doesn’t completely fit in the dinosaur wing. The 37 meters (122-foot) long behemoth’s head has to poke out towards the elevators. It’s got individual bones bigger than people. The name of the group of dinosaurs belongs to the word TITAN.

Paleontologists have many factors explaining why some giant reptiles of yesteryear dwarf modern land creatures. It’s essential to remember that dinosaurs lived a long time ago. Before the dinosaurs were wiped out, they lived on a completely different kind of earth than today. Dinosaurs started coming onto the scene about 230 million years before the present.

During their existence, carbon dioxide levels were all over the place. Estimates vary, but there could have been 3 to 5 times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as today. It means the world, on the whole, was a lot hotter, even up at higher latitudes. During the Mesozoic Era, all land was clumped together in Pangea. The ocean didn’t have as much cooling effect on the supercontinent.

This would make the planet more hospitable for giant cold-blooded reptiles that wouldn’t have to waste energy maintaining body heat. They’d benefit from being bigger because longer intestines would better break down plant matter and extract nutrients.

Then they could spend less time chewing and more time stuffing green down their giant gullets. Also, if the herbivores grew larger, they were harder for predators to take down. Until the predators got bigger, then the herbivores would get bigger.

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