Can you simply scale up animals?

There have been a number of questions focusing on mythical creatures where the logical approach to answering has been to scale up an existing animal. For example dragon's wings can be extrapolated from other flying animals or the speed of an insectoid creature from insects in our world.

However evolution has proved that animals do not simply scale up and down, mammals do not grow beyond a certain size unless they live exclusively in the oceans. Insects do not grow to several metres in length.

I believe that other ratios come into play such as power/weight and volume/skin surface area when it comes to whether creatures could continue to survive, move/fly and stay warm/cool at a larger scale.

Am I right? Is it an over simplification to say "A bird with a length of A has a wingspan of B therefore a dragon which is C long will need to have a wingspan of D"? What other factors come into play when scaling up real creates to simulate new ones?

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Can you simply scale up animals?

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