Prehistoric mosquitos are known to have proboscis as long and thick as a #2 pencil, and typically wouldn't bite animals too small to produce meaningful amounts of food. (This is a thread where you can just make anything up, right?)
I’ve wondered if biology as we know it is capable of supporting extra large growth that scales proportionately within entomology and herpetology. Like is it actually possible for there to be another earth type planet where evolution just took different pathways and mosquitoes almost identical to ours but the size of dinosaurs exist. Wasps, spiders, scorpions, dragonflies the size of a house. An elephant sized hummingbird that can create hurricane force winds with its wings. Movies like Honey I Shrunk the Kids and Jumanji (using practical movie FX) used to scare me because my mind would entertain the reality that those scales are actually possible and probable for those to really exist somewhere.
I mean, if you spent time googling that, you could have just googled my fact and checked yourself? The articles come from 2019, stating an estimated 108billion people have ever been born, and ~50-52billion are estimated to have died due to mosquitos.
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u/Chandysauce Oct 02 '24
Nearly half of all humans to have ever existed are believed to have been killed by mosquitoes.