Lost World Discovered

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Thats factually wrong. Smaller animals have nothing to do with less biomass, and etc.

If you're going to use big grownup terms like "biomass" you better be prepared to do "calculus".



I just showed you in my cat vs tiger comparison how biomass and size have nothing to do with each other. What part of my comparison do you not grasp?

Smaller animals have nothing to do with less biomass. Larger animals have nothing to do with more biomass.
Most of the biomass of the ocean consists of plankton (microscopic, up to insect sized creatures). The biggest animal in the sea, and on the planet, is the blue whale. But the "biomass" of the whole blue whale species is negligibly small compared to the biomass of plankton. That is a fact.

Seriously...why do you use that choice of word?

If you meant "animal X got bigger" then why didnt you just say it that why? Got bigger.

Saying it 'got more biomass' just makes you sound dishonest and pretentious. And on top of that its not accurate, because it doesnt mean the same thing. And it implies that you cant keep it straight which thing (size or biomass) that you're talking about.

Let me put it another way. Twelve thousand years ago humans were all hunter gathers (cave men), and the whole world population was three million. But thanks to the fact that they invented agriculture a few thousand years later we now have seven billion humans. So the 'biomass' of the human species has grown immensly. But the physical size of average human bodies has not changed, or even gotten slightly smaller on average, since cave man days.

@Tross
Yes you are correct, part of the reason for miniaturisation is based on selection pressures whereby large biomass can't be sustained by limited resources. But in the case of pygmy elephants and pygmy humans they live in thick rainforests where having a relatively small biomass helps in camouflage and protection from predators as would have been the case in the open savannah.

The island effect can, however, benefit some species where there are no predators and plentiful food. Examples include birds like the New Zealand Moa and Mauritius Dodo which grew a larger biomass than their original populations (the giant Moa is infact related to the small Kiwi but the former was eradicated by Polynesian hunters for meat as indeed did the Dodo which was also puported to have tasted like Turkey) .

Other examples of isolation include cave animals and deep sea fish where selection pressures increase the chance of survival of depigmented organisms (pigment is useless and a burden in darkness) and eyes (cave catfish survive blind but have highly attuned sensors/feelers much like catfish that live in dark/turbid rivers where visibility is non-existent).

True, and there may be examples of traditionally small Cretaceous creatures that have evolved to be larger. Of course, I think it would most likely be a mammal or non-Dinosaur reptile in that case.