How come in general evolutionary ancestors of most living species were bigger?
Megalodon > sharks
Sabre tooth etc > lions, tigers
Prehistoric birds > modern birds
Mammoths > elephants
Ancient crocodiles > modern
Moore’s law of evolved design miniaturization?
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Seems more like survivor bias: bigger animals are more likely to fossilize and/or we like to talk about them more.
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So you’re getting at sort of a size stability question? Eh why animals don’t hit an optimal/maximum size and then exist at that size indefinitely as long as that kind of animal remains viable?
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Something like that. Biology seems to lack a general economies of scale mechanism. It’s usually special case like blue whale.
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Seems like non-animals might be an interesting line of exploration here: high CO2 produced gigantic cycads, but I don’t know that I’ve heard of vegetation larger than Sequoias.
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I was just thinking perhaps plants scale like backend industrial process tech while animals scale like consumer tech
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