What I find interesting is the "mammal centric" view of this article. Mosquitos LOVE bird blood. That's why they fly, particularly at night, when the birds are nesting! They loved reptiles, and they relished dinosaurs.
“They loved reptiles, and they relished dinosaurs”
exactly right - they’ve found mosquitos with dinosaur blood still in them.
Reptiles never stop growing. The large lizards we find (and the dragon tales from hundreds of years ago before people wiped them out) were just very old lizards, like over 100 years old. That’s why, of all the things out there, we find that lizards used to get very big when the atmospheric pressure and oxygen content of the air was higher - everything lived longer, and lizards never stop growing.
There are lizards now that look exactly like dinosaurs, but smaller. The triceratops for example, has a mini version, which never stops growing, and if it lived to be a couple of hundred years old, would look the spitting image of a triceratops.