What the fuck? Why was there a mega fauna version of almost every animal?

What the frick? Why was there a mega fauna version of almost every animal?

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  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    very unbreaded

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    How come horses started off tiny, but then became mega fauna?

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Mega Penguin
    I want to hug it.

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    1.6m/115kg penguin
    clearly our fren.

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    When I was a kid, I thought Emperor Penguins were 2-2.5 meters tall then Happy Feet ruined everything.

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Earth today is post extinction event. It wasn't a major one but it was global due to rapid changes in climate. Larger species require more resources and so when resources are changed they are less able to weather the new environment long enough to adapt to a sustainable existence. So the largest examples of a given group were more likely to die out.

  7. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    i think megafauna came about through adaption of climate conditions during the ice age. generally larger animals maintain heat better and therefore better expend energy. as the climate changed to become warmer during the end of the ice age animals adapted into the smaller versions we see today. i think the reason why its "everything" is because the only reason we see animals today is because they were able to adapt.

  8. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    we just came out of a minor extinction event and a string of ice ages caused by major temperature fluctuations, so the easy answer is a lack of food, which is why megafauna still exist in a large tropical region. whatever megafauna that was left over got wiped out by humans.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Wrong. The megafauna in the tropics didn't run out of food anymore than the ones in the boreal regions. Mastodons, for example were specialists on spruce foliage, though they didn't necessarily require it. The Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions hit the entire planet. And they hit each region at the same time humans arrive there, not in any other pattern.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        your meme graph with no sources is ignoring island populations that went extinct despite a lack of human contact.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          You mean island populations like the mammoths of Wrangel Island? The mammoths that survived long past all the others because humans didn't know they were there and then immediately went extinct? Or like the pygmy mammoths of Santa Rosae? That also went extinct as soon as humans touched down? Name an island with extinct megafauna not due to humans and I'll name an island with an incomplete anthropological record.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Human migration to those continents might have also been the result of climate change (either pushing humans out of their ancestral lands or simply granting them access to new lands) which would have had it's own impact on animal species
        I don't understand how no matter how many times "correlation does not equal causation" is echoed throughout the internet there's always some moron who looks at a graph with two variables and figures that's the whole story

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >Human migration to those continents might have also been the result of climate change
          It wasn't. You can't just blame everything on the hot stupid trend of the moment.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >trend of the moment
            The current trend is anthropogenic climate change, climate change in general has been happening since the formation of our planet

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            if "humans killed all the megafauna" is true, why are there still megafauna in india? you can claim that megafauna still live in africa because humans came from there, but humans didn't come from india. realistically, humans should have killed them all.

            truth is, india and africa are equatorial regions with more stable climates, that are less affected by ice age climate swings. humans are tropical animals that migrated as the ice age warmed, which lined up with all the megafauna being negatively affected by said climate change. this allowed humans to contribute to their extinction, because they were already having trouble surviving, but humans alone didn't drive them extinct. you can see this on the graph you yourself posted, where humans caused a dip in megafauna species in africa, but didn't kill them all. because they were healthy in their environment, and humans were just a hindrance, not a crisis.

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              The shorter the time since human arrival generally the more megafauna persist. Humans originate from Africa, Africa has the greatest diversity in megafauna. Second longest are Asia and Europe which have the next greatest diversity of megafauna, next is North America again with the next most megafauna and South America in last. Australia is the only exception to this rule because the entire continent dried out massively alongside human arrival

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              >if "humans killed all the megafauna" is true, why are there still megafauna in india?
              You mean the megafauna there that's been almost completely killed off? Tigers, rhinos, elephants, gaur etc are all endangered species last I looked.

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                megafauna in india are only endangered due to the consequences of modern globalization and industrialization, which is a completely different beast to the humans of even 500 years ago. to say modern humans are killing megafauna is a "no shit" statement because we're killing basically everything, and contributes nothing to the topic.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          You know what, your comment really pissed me off. So congratulations on your ebin troll. Why does "correlation equal causation" but only when (You) want it to and why does it only work when it agrees with current pop sci and authoritarian bullshit? The fact is, every single time you look at a Late Pleistocene regional extincion, you find evidence of human hunting.

          EVERY.

          SINGLE.

          FRICKING.

          TIME.

          "It wasn't humans! Overkill is a myth!" is the largest cope in all of human history.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            My post doesn't deny that human hunting wasn't a factor, I'm saying there's a multi variable model at play here, you trolled yourself with your schizo personality and poor reading comprehension

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            And let me be ABSOLUTELY CRYSTAL FRICKING CLEAR. In these situations, when the species are doing well, no humans are present yet or they've just arrived. As soon as humans arrive and start hunting, the species vanish within a few thousand years. And not 10s of thousands of years. Like 2000 or less.

            Overkill is real. You don't have to like it. You will pay for it. End of story. Good bye, disgusting chaos primates. And good riddance.

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              Frick off gorf

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              You can't blame the Younger Dryas extinctions on the humans who had been there for at least 13,000 years by the onset of the extinction wave you think they caused.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Why blacks so bad at massacring all their mega fauna?

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          Still too busy with each other. Euros didn't really get down to business until we exterminated the neanderthals.

          Humanity does not advance until it is waist deep in blood.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        This is BTFO by the fact that we know H.sapiens had colonized the Americas by 26,000 years ago at the latest, not the 13,000 years ago assumed by the Clovis first morons.

  9. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Why was there a mega fauna version of almost every animal?
    Bigger trees makes more oxygen which makes bigger fauna

  10. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    I don't understand why they don't live birth or adopt a more seal like body plan.

  11. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Generally speaking when an animal is well adapted to its environment it will tend towards evolving a larger and larger body. I forget the "law" this is called but it has to deal with larger individuals being less susceptible to predation as well as being more capable of winning in intrasexual competition(I.E. competing for a mate or territory).

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >I forget the "law" this is called

      >Why was there a mega fauna version of almost every animal?
      Cope's Rule combined with the principle that specialization results in extinction. Then you got the odds of your existence at the same time as any giant specialist, and the fact that smaller generalists of any animal survive the extinction.

      >Cope's Rule

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Thanks, anon. Unfortunate name considering how memed the word 'cope' is now.

  12. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    I don't really understand why I should believe any of these things actually existed. Human error or even greed seems like a more reliable explanation

  13. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Giant humans where

  14. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    The simple reason is 99% of species are extinct, so the chances of there being an extinct species bigger than its modern counterpart is almost guaranteed with only a few exceptions like blue whales

  15. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Why was there a mega fauna version of almost every animal?
    Cope's Rule combined with the principle that specialization results in extinction. Then you got the odds of your existence at the same time as any giant specialist, and the fact that smaller generalists of any animal survive the extinction.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Giant animals are usually not specialists

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >Giant animals are usually not specialists
        they specialize in being large

        this specialization exposes them to greater extinction risks because their populations are smaller and more spread out, and they reproduce more slowly than smaller animals.

  16. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    It's just statistics. If there have been hundreds of variations of every existing species, with only a few surviving to modern times, we should expect that many extant species have a larger counterparts among those that went extinct.

  17. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    More oxygen in the air

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >how did animals get so big?
      >more oxygen!
      >how do we know there was more oxygen?
      >because animals got so big!
      morons

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        now consider: megasapiens

        this

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >now consider: megasapiens

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganthropus#Meganthropus_A/Sangiran_6

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >tfw no 8 foot tall moron ape gf

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Bigfoot if he real

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Erectus walks among us and they shoot each other in Chicago.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        There's geologic evidence that there was more oxygen

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >There's geologic evidence that there was more oxygen
          no, there's geological evidence that there was LESS oxygen.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            fewer*

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              Sieg heil

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          when geologists say there was more oxygen we're counting both O2 and CO2. Only one of these things is helpful for animal growth.

          Giant insects and arthropods evolved during a time of elevated O2. Giant vertebrates evolved during times of greatly reduced O2.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Because you can meassure it from the rocks. But ironicly did for example in most of the age of dinosaurs had the earth less oxygen than today

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          Learn English.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      More oxygen was only a thing during the Carboniferous, it was lower during the Mesozoic. Vertebrate lungs are good enough that the oxygen content doesn't matter a whole lot anyway.

      https://i.imgur.com/FmN2Rmx.jpg

      What the frick? Why was there a mega fauna version of almost every animal?

      Not super complex, there's been 540 million years of large animal life and enough different niches to allow a lot of different fauna to get to sizes larger than what they are today (doesn't hurt that a lot of the large fauna on Earth from the past ~400,000 years recently went extinct because of humans+end of glacial period).

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      I hate every single mouth breather who keeps repeating this. This only particularly applies to arthropods during the Carboniferous. Vertebrates are not constrained by oxygen levels to nearly the same extent.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >This only particularly applies to arthropods during the Carboniferous
        even then it seems to be just millipedes

        the largest spiders and insects ever found are alive today.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          That's probably more just preservation bias since many invertebrates don't fossilize well. Scorpions, not-dragonflies that are basically dragonflies, etc were also large

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      this only applies to insects, so you're not that off, but nobody thinks of big spiders as megafauna

  18. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >OP doesn't know what megafauna is
    every time

  19. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    To be fair, there's never been a bigger animal alive than now with the blue whale, so we should at least take solace in that. As for land mammals, most of the largest animals of their kind lived with humans before we wiped (or helped helped wipe) them out. That being said, there were an awful lot of extinctions at the extinction of the Pleistocene for larger megafauna and it really sucks.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Being bigger is an evolutionary disadvantage
      Smaller animals live longer
      It's reasonable to say that that is the reason animals tend to evolve smaller and not all over the place, some smaller some biggers some smaller some biggers
      The very few exceptions

      confirm this

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Wrong. Bodymass is pretty well correlated with longevity and that's simply because large animals have better rates of survival at bigger sizes and more pressure to live longer. Smaller animals advantage is smaller resource consumption and breeding like rabbits, they're more adaptable.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >large animals have better rates of survival at bigger sizes and more pressure to live longer
          You are going to have to produce a source on that chief
          My source is common knowledge, every animal breeder will tell you this, be it dogs, horses, pigs, the bigger the animal, the more rapidly gains bone problems, hip problems, they get tired faster and respond slower at the same age past adulthood

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous
            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              Now produce me a chart like that, that shows that WITHIN A SPECIES, the larger animal lives longer than the smaller one.
              Because it's, you now, the actual topic of the thread.
              And also my point, if you couln't reach the end of the sentence.

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                How's this?
                Maybe dogs and horses are fricked because we fricked them.

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                >WITHIN A SPECIES
                But that's an entirely different thing than what other anon said.
                Sure, within a species there is an optimal size range that if you deviate too much from - small or large - you start getting problems.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >dogs, horses, pigs
            What, domestic animals without any evolutionary survival pressure? This is your evidence for size being an "evolutionary disadvantage?" lmao.

  20. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Animals lived longer before the flood

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Which of the billions of localized floods over the billions of years are you talking about

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        The big one

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          Do you talk about the mega tsunamis, caused by the Chicxulub metoer ? It really effected the coast Iines on the entire planet

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          Most of what you're familiar with is from the Late Pleistocene. Animals just used to be larger before humans killed all the big ones.

          Ah, the one that washed away all your IQ points. Tragedy.

          To be fair, there's never been a bigger animal alive than now with the blue whale, so we should at least take solace in that. As for land mammals, most of the largest animals of their kind lived with humans before we wiped (or helped helped wipe) them out. That being said, there were an awful lot of extinctions at the extinction of the Pleistocene for larger megafauna and it really sucks.

          The largest Sauropods were larger than the Blue Whale. Mammals are nothing but pretenders to the throne of the Dinosaurs.

          More oxygen in the air

          No. Never this. This is bullshit.

          There's geologic evidence that there was more oxygen

          There is literally no body size limitation put upon lifeforms by oxygen. This is made up bullshit in the life sciences community that I'm sure one moron really liked and everyone jumped all over his dick, because that's what always happens.

          >Why was there a mega fauna version of almost every animal?
          Cope's Rule combined with the principle that specialization results in extinction. Then you got the odds of your existence at the same time as any giant specialist, and the fact that smaller generalists of any animal survive the extinction.

          You're still just assuming mass extinctions aren't caused by humans.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >The largest Sauropods were larger than the Blue Whale
            The mass of the animal is what counts. Some Sauropods might be longer than a Blue Whale, but the whales are several times heavier than the largest of sauropods.

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              We are talking mass.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            We are talking mass.

            The largest sauropods aren't even half the mass of the largest blue whale

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        The one that covered an area of approximately 5.5 million square miles

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          I only know about floods in fiction that large

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Do you talk about the mega tsunamis, caused by the Chicxulub metoer ? It really effected the coast Iines on the entire planet

        Can you stop being like this. You're so obnoxious you could convert someone just by virtue of them not wanting to be around you.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          Why should he care what a moron that bases their entire spirituality off spiting Wauf posts converts to?

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >Santa isn't real
          >Can you please stop being so condescending?

          Lol gay

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Ironic comparison. Athiests such as yourself want God to be a santa figure. It's part of an infantile "i deserve good things" mindset, and it's where the whole "why bad thing exist?" argument comes from, proudly spouted by redditors and other internet athiests for years now, like some supreme "gotcha!".
            Condescending is right, you people are visibly manchildren.

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              god exists, the christian god does not exist.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          You ought to know what it says in Matthew about virtue signalling, which is what coming into into a 4xhan thread asking about megafauna and posting a wrong answer that is clearly a virtue signal.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        tartaric mud flood

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      The big one

      The one that covered an area of approximately 5.5 million square miles

      [...]
      Can you stop being like this. You're so obnoxious you could convert someone just by virtue of them not wanting to be around you.

      Noah's Flood did not happen.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        yes it did, i remember it

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        You are wrong.

        https://i.imgur.com/xvgqKRF.jpg

        [...]
        >he believes in Bronze-Aged fairy tales created by ~~*them*~~.

        >implying israelites are even mentioned in any of the first five books of the bible, namely Genesis
        Why do you idiots insist on revealing your ignorance? I mean, it's hilarious to watch you make fools of yourselves, but I guess it's just your pride talking, same reason you can't find God. James 4:6

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >dinosaur footprint and human footprint together
          That is the worst attempt at carving out a dinosaur foot I've ever seen, even the human footprint looks shit. The dinosaur's toes should be more splayed out

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          Gods real name is yahweh. He’s the head of a pantheon of multiple gods. The bible was partially rewritten so the king of israel could claim divine rule, so yahweh and the other minor gods forsook the people of the levant. As humans simply refused to believe the truth other again, the gods settled on sending a spirit down to encourage them to not fight so much, and decided that man shall never see another major miracle again, nor receive their help, for he has blasphemed to secure the power of the kings.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            actually his real name is "Yehovah". It was abbreviated YHWH by rabbis passing the name onto each other and written on the most guarded parts of solomon's temple. The name was known to the Romans after they sacked the temple during their conquest of the Levant, which is where the variant pronunciation "Jehovah" comes from, the attempt to render the semetic tongue in Latin letters.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        why do all humans live to 120 years at most then

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Correct. Odin slew a giant and the world drowned in its blood. Noah if he was real probably drowned and countless animals went extinct.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      The big one

      >he believes in Bronze-Aged fairy tales created by ~~*them*~~.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        the flood is a story in more than one religion, you know. even norse paganism.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >the flood
          you mean a flood?

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          it's almost like ancient religions are fairy tale stories that blended together over time via population migration.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >Ancient humans thousands of miles apart coming up with the same story of a worldwide flood just for the goof of it

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              Or, most humans used to be centralized around one area like most species are, and there was significant cultural interchange. As people migrated outwards using advances in technology to survive long journeys and new climates, they brought that culture with them, but it also changed over time. Pretty much all religion in west, including christianity, hinduism, islam, and norse paganism, derives from the proto-indo-european faith. Even ancient chinese culture carries its hallmarks. If there were ever real gods speaking to man their names are lost to us now and they've forsaken us.

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                >Ancient peoples were centralized
                People arrived in the americas 20,000 years ago
                How do south american and pacific islander cultures (including new zealand) share a common legend with peoples from northern europe that supposedly happened thousands of years after they were all seperated?

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                You know humans have existed for way fricking longer than 20,000 years correct? Anatomically modern humans have existed for ten times longer than that, and older hominids were most likely fully sapient.

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                >and older hominids were most likely fully sapient.
                This is a theory I've toyed with for a while. Erectus was smart enough to build sturdy enough rafts to sail out to Socotra. And were obviously adventurous enough to use them. Sailing out that far would require a set of skills that are unmistakably modern, if rudimentary in form.

                I wish we had better reconstructions of older hominins. Imagine a modern h.floresiensis population.

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                We should clone em

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                If I was insanely rich and powerful I'd try to see if you could backbreed a person with the most neanderthal dna possible.
                I dont think there is enough to reconstruct a whole genome, but you could get close.
                I'm sure thats fricked ethically, but its a neat mental exercise.

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                It'd u ironically probably be easier with just cloning. I dont think we picked up enough of their DNA to actually do that without inbreeding depression being such an issue the embryos just stop being viable after a while. IIRC Neanderthals themselves had a really low genetic diversity due to the harshness of their climate in addition to a high risk hunting strategy.

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                >south american
                You mean the south america where colossal floods occur yearly?
                >pacific islander
                You mean the pacific islands where a single storm can swamp the entire island?
                "Worldwide flood" is literally just flood but big, its not a stretch that the same sort of myth could be created independently in different cultures. Just like independent cultures independently come up with myths like snake but big, person but small, bird but big etc

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                >Just like independent cultures independently come up with myths like snake but big, person but small, bird but big etc

                Because all of those were things those populations had to deal with at some point? You are aware that h. Floresiensis and H. Naledi were both likely contemporary with early H. Sapiens? As were things like terror birds and large constrictors.

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              Its almost like floods are things that happen all around the world. Ancient humans thousands of miles apart in multiple cultures came up with similar myths of a giant serpent/dragon fighting a thunder/storm god so I guess that must be true as well

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                yeah and they came up with extremely similar words for things entirely by chance!

                learn your prehistory, and wonder why human genetic diversity is so low we're basically domestic dogs

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                Didn't toba do that? IIRC h.sapiens was reduced to around 10k individual people. If it did happen it also likely caused or contributed to other archaic hominin extinctions due to low numbers.

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                >entirely by chance!
                You dumb Black person, you do know all languages share a common root, right?

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                And therefore all cultures so the flood story has a single point of origin. Also more people were pantheists than not…

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous
    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Actually Ive never thought about this. I know humans used to be 900+ at the most, but I never considered that animals would have lived longer too

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >Actually Ive never thought about this
        religious people rarely think about their religion

        if they did, they wouldn't be religious anymore.

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