Why do humans stop growing at a certain point, while other animals don’t?
Shownotes
Many bones have special layers of cells on each end known as "growth plates"; these cells are constantly dividing and turning into brand-new bone. That's what makes both you and, say, an alligator grow.
But in humans, once puberty is complete, our bodies release hormones that harden our growth plates permanently, turning them into "no-more-growth" plates.
Humans –along with other mammals, and birds– are energy-hungry critters. Our fast metabolisms allow us to run –or swim or fly– long distances, but they require a lot of energy to sustain, even when we’re at rest. And burning all that energy produces a lot of heat. And if you recall, as an animal grows, its volume, and therefore the amount of heat it produces, increases much faster than its surface area does – surface that's needed to vent that heat outward. Getting too big would burn us up, so it makes sense that there’s a biological process that limits our growth.
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