Dave Hone

Like you're just not going to, unless one like virtually runs into your mouth, you're not going to go and try and eat it.

Yeah, well, I mean, so, I mean, there's no real winners.

There's just, you know, turnover, because ultimately the birds, you know, it still lost out when things went wrong.

And as we were just talking about, you know, things do tend to lose out when they're big.

They're just so much more vulnerable to extinction.

But clearly, dinosaurian ecosystems...

had much bigger herbivores and therefore by extent much bigger carnivores than any system we've seen before or after.

Even in relatively sparse ones like bits of the late Triassic, so when the dinosaurs are really just getting going, or the very early Jurassic, but you've still got some multi-ton herbivores and then you've got some multiple hundred kilo predators, so about as big as elephants and lions get today.

And then once you're in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, it is entirely normal to have multiple species that are 10, 20, 30 tons plus as herbivores and anything up to 5 tons as a carnivore.

I mean, T-Rex is probably the biggest of them, but

carnivores that exceed fully terrestrial carnivores that exceed a ton.

There's dozens of species of dinosaurs.

I mean, they're probably just ecologically dominant in the way that mammals are now.

Crocs get bigger than lions and tigers, but they're fundamentally tied to the water.

But you don't see crocs roaming in the Serengeti or anything like that.

I mean, the really big crocs even now get to over a ton.

So those are very serious animals.

And I think big polar bears...

are in the like 500 kilo range.

Though again, they hunt a lot of stuff in water and then things like grizzlies are at least partially herbivorous or omnivorous.