FRANCE: When life on Earth began around 3.6 billion years ago, all organisms were small. Indeed, it took some 2.5 billion years to evolve any organism that grows larger than a single cell.
Since then, things have accelerated a bit and – along with the great diversification of body forms – animals have tended to get bigger. Indeed, the largest animal ever to live, the blue whale, is still very much with us, and has been swimming the world’s oceans for only a couple of million years – a mere blink of the eye in the long, long history of life in the sea.
This trend towards larger body sizes through evolutionary time has become known as Cope’s Rule, after the American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope. Cope’s rule has been documented or disputed in hundreds of studies of numerous animal lineages over the last century, but a new study in the journal Science provides perhaps the most comprehensive test yet of its existence.
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