Animal Body Size: Linking Pattern and Process across Space, Time, and Taxonomic Group

Galileo wrote that “nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially of his bones”—a statement that wonderfully captures a long-standing scientific fascination with body size. Why are organisms the size that they are? And what determines their optimum size?

This volume explores animal body size from a macroecological perspective, examining sp...