People are fascinated with large things: large buildings, large mammals, large birds, and so on. When it comes to living things, lineages have species which grow bigger and then disappear in evolutionary time. The capability of animals to adapt to environmental change is linked to size and thus generation time. So are we making much ado about large birds and mammals becoming rarer? Remembering the Cope's rule...
Some old reading:
Ecological Strategies and Population Parameters.
The eolution of body size: what keeps organisms small?
Cope's rule, the island rule and the scaling of mammalian population density
How big should a mammal be? A macroecological look at mammalian body size over space and time
Cope's Rule and the Dynamics of Body Mass Evolution in North American Fossil Mammals
and very many more available on a search
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