Also that this part of the galaxy, and the Universe as a whole, seems to be favourably quiescent.
Slightly tangential, have you come across the terms island dwarfism and island gigantism (also insular -), and did you know the New Zealand Kiwi is the T-Rex’s closest living genetic relative. Here’s hoping it never makes it off the island!
It's no wonder that Darwin started thinking "what's happening here" after visiting a bunch of islands.
My favorite island creature is the cold blooded dwarf goat Myotragus balearicus. Likely a victim of human expansion.
Sure it was cold blooded? Wikipedia claims it was a mammal.
The goat bones have a growth pattern only found in reptiles suggesting it had adapted to varying availability of food. Other morpholigic changes (smaller brain, smaller eyes) also suggest that it had at a minimum evolved to withstand low nutrition periods.
The working theory to these observed structures is that this mammal a rare example of a warm blooded creature turning cold blooded.
Stranger things have happened though, the evolutionary path of whales is particularly strange.
I was so excited to read about this, but it turns out further research found that all ruminants possess these structures:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11264
> Our study supplies the strongest evidence so far that homeothermic endotherms arrest growth seasonally, which precludes the use of lines of arrested growth as an argument in support of ectothermy.
The neat thing about this goat is how it now is part of a body of evidence that dinosaurs were endotherms.
But certainly it's not proven. These goats went extinct at something like 1000 BCE