Mysteries of Ice Age Animal Bigness

People are impressed by large things, especially animals, whether real or imaginary. Visual entertainment includes kaiju, rampaging dinosaurs, and even cute but big critters. People are also fascinated by bigness in reality. Entertainment and curiosity raise questions, including about those creatures that lived in the Ice Age.

Saber-tooth tiger image credit: Pixabay / Lutz Peter

So, why were so many larger than others in their created kinds (similar to the family level in modern classifications)? Living things do not have a fondness for following human rules, but there are a few observations that have the word rule tacked on that may be helpful.

Edward Drinker Cope had a rule (observation) that a species in lower strata was smaller than that in upper strata of the same kind of animal. Carl Bergmann noticed that some in colder climates were larger than those where it was warmer. It may not be a case of one rule being right and the other wrong, but mayhaps both are working to some extent.

Riding up on the hill so we can see the big picture, we're taking a biblical creation science approach. Secularists cannot account for even one ice age, let alone many of them. We maintain that there was one Ice Age that was a result of the Genesis Flood. In addition, the account of Noah's Ark is true, and (to simplify this part), dinosaur kinds were on the Ark — juveniles, of course. (Don't be fooled by disingenuous caricatures by atheopaths about dinosaurs and the Ark.) Dispersion of animals after the Flood, the Ice Age, Cope's and Bergmann's rules, and other factors can be configured in plausible creationist conjectures.

Ice Age animals, especially the large mammals, seem to have won a special place in people’s hearts. While plenty of other strange and wonderful fossils inhabit museums, let’s face facts: nobody makes children’s movies or television shows about armored fish or extinct sea-scorpions. . . .

One reason for our fascination is that many familiar animals possessed unusual traits during the Ice Age (who put hair on those elephants?) or lived in unusual places (why did giant South American armadillos move to Texas?). The main interest, however, is that they were, well, big. Something about being big impresses us. An ordinary beaver: no big deal. But an eight-foot-long beaver: now that’s impressive!

To read the entire article (or listen to the audio version by a marvelous reader), chill out at "Why Were Ice Age Animals So Big?"