[azhenfud]

"The largest land mammals that ever lived, Indricotherium and Deinotherium, would have towered over the living African elephant. The tallest on diagram, Indricotherium, an extinct rhino relative, lived during the Eocene to the Oligocene Epoch (37 to 23 million years ago) and reached a mass of 15,000 kg, while Deinotherium (an extinct proboscidean, related to modern elephants) was around from the late-Miocene until the early Pleistocene (8.5 to 2.7 million years ago) and weighed as much as 17,000 Courtesy of Alison Boyer/Yale University

Researchers demonstrate that the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago made way for mammals to get bigger – about a thousand times bigger than they had been."

Is it me or is something @$$ backward here. The modern elephant silhouette is SMALLER than that of the ancients'. Similarly, modern rino's are smaller than their predecessors.

[null and void]

Yes, IF it were purely linear the largest mammals would be alive right now.

But it's not purely linear. The climate has changed, the number of competitors has changed, the available food supplies have changed, species have gone extinct for causes not necessarily related to size.

Current conditions have a different optimal size than past conditions.

Animals adapted accordingly, or died out.