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New study shows that during the course of mass extinction, it is the large animals that suffer the most. Scientists that have studied the mass extinction that happened 359 million years ago said that while the large species died, the small ones survived. Lauren Sallan, one of the researchers said in a news release, "Rather than having this thriving ecosystem of large things, you may have one gigantic relict, but otherwise everything is the size of a sardine,"

The scientists have been debating the reason that led to the changes in the animal body size over the years. One of the most prominent theories, known as the Cope's Rule, states that some of the species have the tendency to increase in size over a period of time as a result of evolutionary changes and the advantage of being large, including the ability to catch a prey easily. There are also other theories that suggest that the animals have a bigger size when the climate is colder or the oxygen levels are increased. Lilliput Effect suggests that when the mass extinctions happen, the body size tends to be smaller, reports Science Daily Report.

To get better clarity about the size of fish's body, the researchers studied the dataset of 1120 fossils of the fish that date back some 400 million years ago. The scientists took the body-size information from the photographs, paper, photographs, fossil bits and specimens. According to Cope's Rule, vertebrates experienced an increase in size during the Devonian period. In fact, in that period, the fishes were known to be the size of a bus. However, after the mass extinction, 97% of the vertebrate species were obliterated and the body size declined over a period of 40 years, as per the findings published in the Journal science.