Giants of the Animal Kingdom

[Cyranian]

I was just surfing the web a while ago when I came across sites with galleries of giant squids, octopuses, and jellyfish. I looked further and found giant clams and mollasks. These giant creatures are all marine organisms. I was wondering if there exists any giant land creatures presently besides elephants, alligators, giraffes etc? If there are, how rare would they be?

[biostudent84]

Sasquatch maybe

[Cyranian]

Sasquatch? Haha. Thinking of which, is Big Foot a fact or myth?

[biostudent84]

I had a PhD in Ecology once tell me that it is impossible for Sasquatch to exist, but I forget the reason behind it.

[Inuyasha]

Logically bigfoot or any other monster couldn't exist in today's enviroment or lack of one. Citys and the destruction of habitats would have flushed out at least one of these mythical organism by now if they existed. No fossil records exist either of any recent gigantic creature.

[Inuyasha]

Another huge creature is the liger which is twice the size of a lion and weghts on average at least 1000 pounds

[biostudent84]

couldn't exist in today's enviroment or lack of one

Never say that humans are destroying the planet. The planet will destroy humans before that happens. Dinosaurs were once the dominant organisms on Terra Firma. They died and the planet lived on. Just because we are making the world impossible to sustain our own lives does not mean we are destroying the planet.

[Deflare]

Most megafauna (really big animals) has gone extinct long ago. The biggest reptiles, the dinosaurs, went extinct 65 million years ago. The biggest birds were incapable of competing with mammalian hunters and went extinct. Giant mammals, such as the wooly mammoth and giant ground sloth, went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age, presumably with the help of humans.

Note: Just because something has 'giant' in its common name doesn't mean that it has any special status; it just means that someone decided that it looked like a big version of something else. Marine animals were some of the most recent discoveries, so they were called 'giant _________'; had they been discovered moe recently, they would have their own names.

After all, if people hadn't know about giraffes, they might have called them 'giant camels' or something like that.

[MrMistery]

I saw a documentary once on "the giant beaver". The ice age killed it. It was cute

[Inuyasha]

Is being bigger really a better trait. Why has everything in the last million years become smaller. Dinosaurs where ten times elepahnts. Sea beast were two times bigger than whales. Are will going on a smaller scale?

[MrMistery]

Being big helpes, but until a certain limit. Big people beat little people, this rule of homo sapiens apply to most species
One of the hypothesises existent for the extinction of dynasaurs is that they couldn't addapt to changing climate(one of the reasons is that they were too big)
I can't write any more because i'm to tired. It is now 12.15 pm and i am practically asleep...

[longtian006]

Hey Bryan, here's a trick. When you want to look up papers and such on biology try google scholar search. go to google than click on more and then click on scholar. It will look for the data base for all papers on the subject you want. Good luck on ur bio report