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LARGE VERSUS SMALL. "It has long been known that very large plants and animals are functionally unlike their smaller counterparts: they are more likely to be top consumers or producers, to tolerate a greater range of environmental conditions (at least in the case of animals), to maintain internal homeostasis more effectively, to be less vulnerable as adults to lethal predation, to compete more successfully for mates (again mainly in animals) and to be more prone to extinction during times of crisis." https://lnkd.in/dv_ZqB3 View in LinkedIn

GIGANTISM. "The largest species (global giants) in all categories are of post-Paleozoic age. Gigantism at this level appeared tens to hundreds of millions of years after mass extinctions and long after the origins of clades in which it evolved.” https://lnkd.in/dv_ZqB3 View in LinkedIn

PREHISTORIC GIGANTISM. https://lnkd.in/dfVpM2x View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE ponders the issue of gigantism during certain periods of evolution, when insects, plants, and animals gained enormous sizes. Our focus this weekend is on giant insects and why they arose. We grew up learning that insects are at their physiological limit today, due to their respiratory system, so how were ancient insects so big? How were they differently adapted to overcome their plumbing? And were they structurally different so that they could carry a greater body mass on delicate wings? View in LinkedIn

STEEN RASMUSSEN: "Professor Rasmussen is currently the Head of the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT), a Research Director at the Department for Physics and Chemistry at University of Southern Denmark, External Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, USA, as well as Principle Investigator for the upstart of the Initiative for Society, and Policy (ISSP) in Denmark." https://lnkd.in/dnUNrjM View in LinkedIn

AREA TO VOLUME LIMITATIONS. "Flying insects should be particularly susceptible to variations in atmospheric pO2 because their flight musculature has high energy demands, particularly during periods of active flight. The volume occupied by tracheae, tubes that transport oxygen throughout the body, scales hypermetrically with body volume, imposing further surface area-to-volume constraints on maximum size." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

THE TRANSITION. "We want to understand how the nonliving materials, if you put them together in an appropriate manner, suddenly can become living. It has to do with understanding how matter organizes in a different way." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

UNCOUPLING AND INCREASED INTERACTIONS. "A further decrease in maximum size during the Cenozoic may relate to the evolution of bats, the Cretaceous mass extinction, or further specialization of flying birds. The decoupling of insect size and atmospheric pO2 coincident with the radiation of birds suggests that biotic interactions, such as predation and competition, superseded oxygen as the most important constraint on maximum body size of the largest insects." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

STEPS BACK. "If you want to create life more simplistically than modern life is doing it, you can't use the sophisticated solutions modern life has evolved. It means you end up constructing your own building blocks. You have to build systems that are based on much simpler components. You actually need to have some of these components to carry more than one functionality." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

RELATIONSHIP OF SIZE AND O2. "The data are best explained by a model relating maximum size to atmospheric environmental oxygen concentration (pO2) until the end of the Jurassic, and then at constant sizes, independent of oxygen fluctuations, during the Cretaceous and, at a smaller size, the Cenozoic. Maximum insect size decreased even as atmospheric pO2 rose in the Early Cretaceous following the evolution and radiation of early birds, particularly as birds acquired adaptations that allowed more agile flight." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn