Spider Tales 1: The giants from the Past
" Whatever your dream, your fantasy is, there's a scientist somewhere who's busy ruining it" Boulet , 2009 A common misconception about fossils is that in prehistoric times, animals were much larger than their modern counterparts. There are several reasons why: 1. A question of probability: even based on a model where biodiversity would be constantly increasing since the emergence of life on Earth, extinct species that came and went in the last 600 million years (including those we don't know about, i.e. the vast majority) necessarily outnumber those that are around today. The biodiversity living alongside us at the present is only a tiny slice of the long history of life on Earth, one thin page in a book that has billions of them. This makes it all the more likely for "extreme" forms, in a given taxonomic group, to have existed at some point in time and eventually gone extinct, than to exist today (particularly if that group has a long and...