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Dinosaurs And The Gravity Problem (by Ted Holden)


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Scientists delight in devising explanations for the great dinosaur

extinctions. But there are several questions which they have

failed to even ask, much less tried to answer. Why, for instance,

in all of the time claimed to have passed since the dinosaur extinctions,

has nothing ever re-evolved to the sizes of the large dinosaurs?

If such sizes worked for creatures which ruled the Earth for tens of

millions of years, then why would not some species of elephant or rhinoceros

have evolved to such a size again? What kinds of problems, if

any, would sauropod sizes entail in our world as it is presently constituted?

Could it be that some aspect of our environment might have to

be massively different for such creatures to exist at all? A careful

study of the sizes of these antediluvian creatures, and what it would

take to deal with such sizes in our world, has led me to believe that the

super animals of Earth's past could not live in our present world at

all.

A look at sauropod dinosaurs as we know them today requires

that we relegate the brontosaur, once thought to be one of the largest

sauropods, to welterweight or at most middleweight status. Fossils

found in the 1970's now dwarf this creature. Both the brachiosaur and

the supersaur were larger than the brontosaur, and the ultrasaur appears

to have dwarfed them all. The ultrasaur is now estimated to

have weighed 180 tons.

A comparison of dinosaur lifting requirements to human lifting

capabilities is enlightening, though there might be objections to doing

so. One objection that might be raised is that animal muscle tissue

was somehow "better" than that of humans. This, however, is known

not to be the case. According to Knut Schmidt-Nielson, author of

Scaling: Why is Animal Size So Important?, the maximum stress or

force that can be exerted by any muscle is independent of body-size

and is the same for mouse or elephant muscle.

Another objection might be that sauropods were aquatic creatures.

But nobody believes that anymore; they had no adaptation for

aquatic life, their teeth show wear and tear which does not come from

eating soft aquatic vegetation, and trackways show them walking on

land with no difficulty.

A final objection might be that dinosaurs were somehow more

"efficient" than top human athletes. This, however, goes against all

observed data. As creatures get bulkier, they become less efficient; the

layers of thick muscle in limbs begin to get in each other's way and

bind to some extent. For this reason, scaled lifts for the superheavyweight

athletes are somewhat lower than for, say, the 200-pound

athletes. By "scaled lift" I mean a lift record divided by the two-thirds

power of the athlete's body weight.

As creatures get larger, weight, which is proportional to volume,

goes up in proportion to the cube of the increase in dimension.

Strength, on the other hand, is known to be roughly proportional to the

cross-section of muscle for any particular limb and goes up in proportion

to the square of the increase in dimension. This is the familiar

"square-cube" problem.

Consider the case of Bill Kazmaier, the king of the power lifters

in the 1970s and 1980s. Power lifters are, in my estimation, the

strongest of all athletes; they concentrate on the three most difficult

total-body lifts, i.e. bench press, squat, and dead-lift. They work out

many hours a day and, it is fairly common knowledge, use food to flavor

their anabolic steroids. No animal the same weight as one of these

men could be presumed to be as strong. Kazmaier was able to do

squats and dead lifts with weights between 1,000 and 1,100 pounds on

a bar, assuming he was fully warmed up.

Any animal has to be able to lift its own weight off the

ground, i.e. stand up, with no more difficulty than Kazmaier experiences

doing a 1,000-pound squat. Consider, however, what would

happen to Mr. Kazmaier, were he to be scaled up to 70,000 pounds,

the weight commonly given for the brontosaur. Kazmaier's maximum

effort at standing, fully warmed up, assuming the 1,000 pound squat,

was 1,340 pounds (1,000 pounds for the bar and 340 pounds for himself).

The scaled maximum lift would be 47,558 pounds (the solution

to: 1,340/340.667= x/70,000.667). Clearly, he would not be able to lift

his weight off the ground!

A sauropod dinosaur had four legs you might say; so what

happens if Mr. Kazmaier uses arms and legs at 70,000 pounds? The

truth is that the squat uses almost every muscle in the athlete's body

very nearly to the limits, but in this case, it does not even matter. A

near maximum bench press effort for Mr. Kazmaier would fall around

600 pounds. This merely changes the 1,340 pounds to 1,940 pounds

in the equation above, and the answer comes out as 68,853 pounds.

Even using all muscles, some more than once, the strongest man who

we know anything about would not be able to lift his own weight off

the ground at 70,000 pounds.

To believe then, that a brontosaur could stand at 70,000

pounds, one has to believe that a creature whose weight was mostly

gut and the vast digestive mechanism involved in processing huge

amounts of low-value foodstuffs was, somehow, stronger than an almost

entirely muscular creature its size, far better trained and conditioned

than any grazing animal. That is not only ludicrous in the case

of the brontosaur, but the calculations only become more absurd when

you try to scale up to the supersaur and ultrasaur at their sizes.

How heavy can an animal get to be in our world, then? How

heavy would Mr. Kazmaier be at the point at which the square-cube

problem made it as difficult for him to stand up as it is for him to do

1,000-pound squats at his present weight of 340 pounds? The answer

is 20,803 pounds (the solution to: 1,340/340.667= x/x.667). In reality,

elephants do not appear to get quite to that point. Christopher McGowan,

curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum,

claims that a Toronto Zoo specimen was the largest in North

America at 14,300 pounds, and Smithsonian personnel once informed

me that the gigantic bush elephant specimen which appears at their

Museum of Natural History weighed around 8 tons.

A study of the sauropod dinosaurs' long neck further underscores

the problem these creatures would have living under current

gravitational conditions. Scientists who study sauropod dinosaurs now

claim that they held their heads low, because they could not have gotten

blood to their brains had they held them high.6 McGowan mentions

the fact that a giraffe's blood pressure -- which at 200-to-300 mm Hg

(millimeters of mercury) is far higher than that of any other animal --

would probably rupture the vascular system of any other animal. The

giraffe's blood pressure is maintained by thick arterial walls and by a

very tight skin that apparently acts like a jet pilot's pressure suit. A

giraffe's head might reach to 20 feet.

How a sauropod might have gotten blood to its brain at 50 or

60 feet is the real question."Gravity is a pervasive force in the environment

and has dramatically shaped the evolution of plants and animals,"

notes Harvey Lillywhite, a zoologist at the University of

Florida at Gainesville. As some land animals evolved large body sizes,

"cardiovascular specializations were needed to help them withstand

the weight of blood in long vertical vessels. Perhaps nowhere in the

history of life were these challenges greater than among the gigantic,

long-necked sauropods" For a Barosaurus to hold its head high, Lillywhite

has calculated that its heart "must have generated pressures at

least six times greater than those of humans and three to four times

greater than those of giraffes."

Faced with the same dilemma, University of Pennsylvania

geologist Peter Dodson remarked that while the Brachiosaurus was

built like a giraffe and may have fed like one, most sauropods were

built quite differently."At the base of the neck," Dodson writes,"a

sauropod's vertebral spines, unlike those of a giraffe, were weak and

low and did not provide leverage for the muscles required to elevate

the head in a high position. Furthermore, the blood pressure required

to pump blood up to the brain, thirty or more feet in the air, would

have placed extraordinary demands on the heart and would seemingly

have placed the animal at severe risk of a stroke, an aneurysm, or

some other circulatory disaster."

The only way to keep the required blood pressure "reasonable," Dodson

goes on to add, is "if sauropods fed with the neck extended just a

little above heart level, say from ground level up to fifteen feet..." One

problem with this solution is that the good leaves were, in all likelihood,

above the 20-foot mark; an ultrasaur that could not raise its

head above 20 feet would probably starve. Dodson, it should also be

noted, entirely neglects the dilemma of the brachiosaur. And there is

another problem, which is worse. Try holding your arm out horizontally

for even a few minutes, and then imagine your arm being 40 feet

long.

Given a scale model and a weight figure for the entire dinosaur,

it is possible to use volume-based techniques to estimate weight

for a sauropod's neck. An ultrasaur is generally thought to be a near

cousin -- if not simply a very large specimen -- of the brachiosaur.

The technique, then, is to measure the volume of water which the sauropod's

neck (severed at the shoulders and filled with bondo or autobody

putty) displaces, versus the volume which the entire brachiosaur

displaces, and simply extrapolate to the 360,000-pound figure for the

ultrasaur. I did this using a Larami Corporation model of a brachiosaur,

which is to scale. To make a long story short, the neck weighs

28,656 pounds, and the center of gravity of that neck is 15 feet from

the shoulders, the neck itself being 38 feet long. This equates to

429,850 foot-pounds of torque.

If we assume the sauropod could lift its head at least as easily

as a human with an 18-inch neck can move his head against a neckexercise

machine set to 130 pounds, then the sauropod would require

the muscular strength of a neck 17.4 feet in diameter. With a more

reasonable assumption of effort, equivalent to the human using a

50-pound setting, the sauropod would require a neck of over 20 feet in

diameter. But the sauropod's neck, at its widest, apparently measured

about ten feet by seven feet where it joined the shoulders, then narrowed

rapidly to about six or seven feet in diameter over the remainder

of its length. McGowan and others claim that the head and neck

were supported by a dorsal ligament and not muscles, but we know of

no living creature using ligaments to support a body structure which

its available musculature cannot sustain. In all likelihood, sauropods,

in our gravity at least, could neither hold their heads up nor out.

Antediluvian Flying Creatures...

The large flying creatures of the past would also have had difficulties

in our present-day gravity. In the antediluvian world,

350-pound flying creatures soared in skies which no longer permit flying

creatures above 30 pounds or so. Modern birds of prey, like the

Argentinian teratorn, weighing 170 to 200 pounds, with 30-foot wingspans,

also flew. Within recorded history, Central Asians have been

trying to breed hunting eagles for size and strength, and have not gotten

them beyond 25 pounds or thereabouts. Even at that weight they

are able to take off only with the greatest difficulty. Something was

vastly different in the pre-flood world.

Nothing much larger than 30 pounds or so flies anymore, and

those creatures, albatrosses and a few of the largest condors and

eagles, are marginal. Albatrosses, notably, are called "goonie birds"

by sailors because of the extreme difficulty they experience taking off

and landing, their landings being badly controlled crashes, and this despite

long wings made for maximum lift.

In remote times, the felt effect of the force of gravity on Earth

must have been much less for such giant creatures to be able to fly.

No flying creature has since re-evolved into anything of such size, and

the one or two birds that have retained this size have forfeited flight,

their wings becoming vestigial.

Adrian Desmond, in his book The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs,

has a good deal to say about some of the problems the Pteranodon

faced at just 40-to-50 pounds. Scientists once thought this pterosaur

was the largest creature that ever flew. The bird's great size and

negligible weight must have made for a rather fragile creature."It is

easy to imagine that the paper-thin tubular bones supporting the gigantic

wings would have made landing dangerous," writes Desmond.

"How could the creature have alighted without shattering all of its

bones? How could it have taken off in the first place? It was obviously

unable to flap 12-foot wings strung between straw-thin tubes. Many

larger birds have to achieve a certain speed by running and flapping

before they can take off and others have to produce a wing beat speed

approaching hovering in order to rise. To achieve hovering with a

23-foot wingspread, Pteranodon would have required 220 pounds of

flight muscles as efficient as those in humming birds. But it had reduced

its musculature to about 8 pounds, so it is inconceivable that

Pteranodon could have taken off actively."

Since the Pteranodon could not flap its wings, the only flying

it could ever do, Desmond concludes, was as a glider. It was, he says,

"the most advanced glider the animal kingdom has produced." Desmond

notes a fairly reasonably modus operandi for the Pteranodon.

Not only did the bird have a throat pouch like a pelican but its remains

were found with fish fossils, which seems to suggest a pelican-like existence,

soaring over the waves and snapping up fish without landing.

If so, then the Pteranodon should have been practically immune from

the great extinctions of past ages. Large animals would have the greatest

difficulty getting to high ground and other safe havens at times of

floods and other global catastrophes. But high places safe from flooding

were always there, oceans were always there, and fish were always

there. The Pteranodon's way of life should have been

impervious to all mishap.

There is one other problem. The Pteranodon was not the largest

bird. The giant Terotorn finds of Argentina were not known when

Desmond's book was written. News of this bird's existence first appeared

in the 1980s. The Terotorn was a 160-to-200 pound eagle with

a 27-foot wingspan, a modern bird whose existence involved, among

other things, flapping wings and aerial maneuvers. But how so? How

could it even have flown?

How large can an animal be and still fly?"With each increase

in size, and therefore also weight," writes Desmond,"a flying animal

It is for this reason that scientists believed Pteranodon and its

needs a concomitant increase in power (to beat the wings in a flapper

and to hold and maneuver them in a glider), but power is supplied by

muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure. The

larger a flyer becomes the disproportionately weightier it grows by the

addition of its own power supply. There comes a point when the

weight is just too great to permit the machine to remain airborne. Calculations

bearing on size and power suggested that the maximum

weight that a flying vertebrate can attain is about 50 pounds..."

slightly larger but lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx were the

largest flying animals of all time. The experience from our present

world coincides well with this and, in fact, don't go quite that high.

The biggest flying creatures which we actually see are albatrosses,

geese, and the like, at 30 to 35 pounds.

The Pteranodon's reign as the largest flying creature of all

time actually fell in the early 1970s when Douglas Lawson of the University

of California found partial skeletons of three ultra-large pterosaurs

in Big Bend National Park in Texas. This discovery forced

scientists to rethink their ideas on the maximum size permissible in

flying vertebrates. The immense size of the Big Bend pterosaurs may

be gauged by noting that the humerus or upper arm bones of these

creatures is fully twice the length of Pteranodon's. Lawson estimated

the wingspan for this living glider at over fifty feet.

The Big Bend pterosaurs were not fishers. Their remains were

found in rocks that were formed some 250 miles inland and nowhere

near any lake deposits. This led Lawson to suggest that these birds

were carrion feeders, gorging themselves on rotting mounds of dismembered

dinosaur flesh. But this hypothesis raised numerous questions

in author Desmond's mind.

"How they could have taken to the air after gorging themselves

is something of a puzzle," he wonders."Wings of such an extraordinary

size could not have been flapped when the animal was

grounded. Since the pterosaurs were unable to run in order to launch

themselves they must have taken off vertically. Pigeons are only able

to take-off vertically by reclining their bodies and clapping the wings

in front of them; as flappers, the Texas pterosaurs would have needed

very tall stilt-like legs to raise the body enough to allow the 24-foot

wings to clear the ground. The main objection, however, still rests in

the lack of adequate musculature for such an operation." 12 The only

solution seems to be that they lifted passively off the ground by the

wind. But this situation, notes Desmond, would leave these ungainly

Brobdignagian pterosaurs vulnerable to attack when grounded.

While Desmond mentions a number of ancillary problems

here, any of which would throw doubt on the pterosaur's ability to exist

as mentioned, he neglects the biggest question of all: the calculations

that say 50 pounds are the maximum weight have not been

shown to be in error; we have simply discovered larger creatures.

Much larger. This is what is called a dilemma.

Those who had estimated a large wingspan for the Big Bend

bird were immediately attacked by aeronautical engineers."Such dimensions

broke all the rules of flight engineering," wrote Colorado paleontologist

Robert T. Bakker, in The Dinosaur Heresies, "a creature

that large would have broken its arm bones if it tried to fly..." Subsequently,

the proponents of a large wingspan were forced to back off

somewhat, since the complete wing bones had not been discovered.

But Bakker believes these pterosaurs really did have wingspans of

over 60 feet and that they simply flew despite our not comprehending

how. The problem is ours, he says, and he proposes no solution.

So much for the idea of anything re-evolving into the sizes of

the flying creatures of the antedeluvian world. What about the possibility

of man breeding something like a Teratorn? Could man actively

breed even a 50-pound eagle?

Berkuts are the biggest of eagles. And Atlanta, an eagle that

Sam Barnes, one of England's top falconers in the 1970s, brought

back to Wales from Kirghiz, Russia, is, at 26 pounds in flying trim, as

large as they ever get.14 These eagles have been bred specifically for

size and ferocity for many centuries. They are the most prized of all

possessions amongst nomads, and are the imperial hunting bird of the

Turko-Mongol peoples. The only reason Barnes was allowed to bring

her back is that Atlanta had a disease for which no cure was available

was told, would normally be worth more than a dozen of the most

beautiful women in Kirghiz.

The killing powers of a big eagle are out of proportion to its

size. Berkuts are normally flown at wolves, deer, and other large prey.

Barnes witnessed Atlanta killing a deer in Kirghiz, and was told that

she had killed a black wolf a season earlier. Mongols and other nomads

raise sheep and goats, and obviously have no love for wolves. A

wolf might be little more than a day at the office for Atlanta with her

11-inch talons, however, a wolf is a big deal for an average-sized Berkut

at 15-to-20 pounds. Obviously, there would be an advantage to

having the birds be bigger, i.e. to having the average Berkut weigh 25

pounds, and for a large one to weigh 40-to-50 pounds. It has never

been done, however, despite all the efforts and funds poured into the

enterprise since the days of Genghis Khan. The breeding of Berkuts

has continued apace from that day to this, but the Berkuts have still

not gotten any bigger than 25 pounds or so.

It is worth recalling here the difficulty which increasingly

larger birds experience in getting airborne from flat ground. Atlanta

was powerful enough in flight, but she was not easily able to take off

from flat ground. This could spell disaster in the wild. A bird of prey

will often land with prey, and if take-off from flat ground to avoid

trouble is not possible, the bird's life becomes imperiled. A bird bigger

than Atlanta with her 10-foot wingspan, like a Teratorn with a

27-foot wingspan and weighing 170 pounds, would simply not

There are other categories of evidence, derived from a careful

analysis of antediluvian predators, to show that gravitational conditions

in the distant past were not the same as they are today. It is well

known, for example, that elephant-sized animals cannot sustain falls,

and that elephants spend their entire lives avoiding them. For an elephant,

the slightest tumble can break bones and/or destroy enough tissue

to prove fatal. Predators, however, live by tackling and tumbling

with prey. One might think that this consideration would preclude the

existence of any predator too large to sustain falls. Weight estimates

for the tyrannosaurs, however, include specimens heavier than any

elephant. That appears to be a contradiction.

Moreover, elephants are simply too heavy to run in our world.

As is well known, they manage a kind of a fast walk. They cannot

jump, and anything resembling a gully stops them cold. Mammoths

were as big and bigger than the largest elephants, however, and Pleistocene

art clearly shows them galloping.

Finally, there is the Utahraptor. Recently found in Utah, this

creature is a 20-foot, 1,500-pound version of a Velociraptor.16 The

creature apparently ran on the balls of its two hind feet, on two toes in

fact, the third toe carrying a 12-inch claw for disemboweling prey.

This suggests a very active lifestyle. Very few predators appear to be

built for attacking prey notably larger than themselves; the Utahraptor

appears to be such a case.

In our world, of course, 1,500-pound toe dancers do not exist.

The only example we have of a 1,500-pound land predator is the Kodiak

bear, the lumbering gait and mannerisms of which are familiar to

us all. And so, over and over again, this same kind of dilemma-things

which cannot happen in our world having been the norm in the antediluvian

world.

An Explanation Ventured

The laws of physics do not change, nor does the gravitational

constant, as far as we know. But something was obviously massively

different in the world in which these creatures existed, and that difference

probably involved a change in perceived gravity. This solution

derives from the continuing research of neo-catastrophists, that is, followers

of the late Immanuel Velikovsky, and is known as the "Saturn

Myth" theory.

The basic requirement for an attenuated perception of gravity

involves the Earth being in a very close orbit around a smaller and

much cooler stellar body (or binary body) than our present Sun. One

pole would always be pointed directly at this nearby small star or

binary system. The intense gravitational attraction would pull the

Earth into an egg shape rather than its present spherical shape, so that

the planet's center of gravity would be off center towards the small

star. This would generate the torque necessary to counteract the natural

gyroscopic force and keep the Earth's pole pointed in the same

The consequences of this intense gravitational pull would be

dramatic. It would allow, first of all, for gigantic animals like the dinosaurs

(just as any change in gravity to the present situation would

likely cause their demise). It would also tend to draw all of the Earth's

land mass into a single supercontinent (Pangea). Why else, after all,

should the Earth's continental masses have amassed in one place? And

finally, with the Earth's pole pointed straight at this star or binary system,

there would be no seasons. All literature of the distant past points

out that the seasons did not appear until after the flood.

The state of the present solar system indicates that this previous

system was eventually captured by a larger star, our present

Sun. But the pieces of this old system have not vanished. The influential

small star or binary system of the past remains, though its reign of

power has ended. The star or stars are Jupiter and Saturn, the next

largest objects to the Sun in our present system.

It is instructive that the ancients worshiped Jupiter and Saturn

as the two chieftain gods in all of the antique religious systems. If the

present solar system was present in the distant past, one would expect

primitive peoples to have worshiped the most visible of the astral bodies:

the Sun, the Moon, and Venus. There is no conceivable reason

they would worship as gods two planets which most people cannot

even find in the night sky -- unless, of course, these bodies occupied a

far more prominent place in the heavens than they do today.

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I read somewhere one theory that allowed dinos to get so big was that the atmospheric pressure on the earth was much higher and that would allow for the size and muscle mass spoken of in the past. :)

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As for Jupiter and Saturn, the planets were unknown to the ancients who worshiped that pantheon and were named for the gods long after the fact.

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

>Paleontology is an evolving science.

>May your wonders never cease!

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There is no way I'm reading that entire article... but.... What I did read made no sense.

The (supposed) reason that everything was bigger back then was the levels of oxygen. They were much higher that they are now. Also, oxygenated muscle is much more efficient than oxygen depleted muscle.

Also, rather than comparing the dynamics and abilities of dinosaurs to humans, why don't they try doing that with a Chimpanzee, which is about 6-8 times stronger than a human pound for pound. Or perhaps a flea, which can jump 200 times the length of their own body. Ever see a human jump 900 feet? (no, that does not include off a cliff... lol)

You just can't assume the ability and strength of a dinosaur by comparing it pound for pound with a human. Are there any species today that don't have the ability to perform a basic function like holding their heads up to eat? (except Tracer when he's drunk, but that's another post entirely)

Then why would anyone assume that a dinosaur would be unable to hold their heads up and outward? There are obviously things we don't understand about life 65 million years ago, but let's use a little basic logic and common sense when we guess.

How about these people that are convinced that the loch ness monster is a leftover plesiasaur? lol.

Dave Bowen

Collin County, Texas.

Paleontology: The next best thing to time travel.

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As for Jupiter and Saturn, the planets were unknown to the ancients who worshiped that pantheon and were named for the gods long after the fact.
I know that they have a 4,500 yr old tablet dated at 2,500 BC from Sumer which is where modern day Iraq is that clearly shows our solar system with the sun in the center! :blink:

post-1761-1251412382_thumb.jpg

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Where did the other 2 planets come from? I'm seeing 11 on the tablet.

Perhaps they were just simply creating the sun with some night time stars? Could it be that simple? :ph34r:

Dave Bowen

Collin County, Texas.

Paleontology: The next best thing to time travel.

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How much would the weather (climate) have to do with size :mellow:

Or the positions of the earth plates at this time period :blush:

Was the gravitational pull the same as now :wacko:

How about the make up of the air they breathed :drool:

Have you thought about the N.& S poles, where they the same as now :angry:

Now you made me feel like ti Friday and I need a BEER :faint:

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Where did the other 2 planets come from? I'm seeing 11 on the tablet.

Perhaps they were just simply creating the sun with some night time stars? Could it be that simple? :ph34r:

Check out the relative sizes of the bodies they seem to match up. Maybe there's 2 more out there we haven't found yet? :blink:
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Check out the relative sizes of the bodies they seem to match up. Maybe there's 2 more out there we haven't found yet? :blink:

I suppose that's possible. They could have cloaking devices turned on. Maybe back then the cloaking devices were still in R&D.

I'm actually being serious. there could very well be all kinds of things right under our noses that we just don't have the ability to see. :)

I'm 100% convinced we're not alone, and haven't been for a long time. As for the dino's, who knows. things were very different back then, we just don't know the extent yet.

And yea, I agree. It's beer:30.

Dave Bowen

Collin County, Texas.

Paleontology: The next best thing to time travel.

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Isn't gravity here on Earth a number that is fixed based upon mass/density? I don't see how gravity could have ever changed on Earth enough to make a difference. Another thing that should be taken into consideration when it comes to size is bone structure. I forgot where I read it, but Paraceratherium was supposed to be at just about the maximum size for mammals. That determination, I believe, was based on the bone structure. Apparently some dinos had the structure that would support extreme pressures. I like the oxygen idea best. Next time you're outside and see an ant, look down and wonder what he would say about us. Okay, my brain is done for the day. Later.

Nick

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Check out the relative sizes of the bodies they seem to match up. Maybe there's 2 more out there we haven't found yet? :blink:

Perhaps they were destroyed long ago :wacko::)

It is theorized that Earth was hit by another planet called Theia and merged. A small chunk or Theia is theorized to be out moon. Perhaps it could of happened with the other planets, who knows :wacko::D

Anyway here is a link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis

The soul of a Fossil Hunter is one that is seeking, always.

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Never heard of this fella, but when he says that mammals never experimented with gigantism, he lost me entirely. Has he never heard of titanotheres?

ashcraft, brent allen

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Paraceratherium was related to the titanotheres as well. This guy got 18' at the shoulder, and 25' at the head!! They estimate his weight at about 10-20 metric tons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraceratherium

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...uchitherium.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...heriumSkull.jpg

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Never heard of this fella, but when he says that mammals never experimented with gigantism, he lost me entirely. Has he never heard of titanotheres?

What about indricotherium? ;)

The soul of a Fossil Hunter is one that is seeking, always.

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Guest solius symbiosus
Never heard of this fella, but when he says that mammals never experimented with gigantism, he lost me entirely. Has he never heard of titanotheres?

That he writes in the third sentence:

...in all of the time
claimed
to have passed since the dinosaur extinctions

Then goes on to make repeated claims of an "antideluvian" period, was enough for me to realize he is nothing but a crackpot, and not worth my time.

If that wasn't enough, he then tries to explain his inane babbling by using the thoughts of one of the greatest wack-a-loons of our time,Velikosky.

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Never heard of this fella, but when he says that mammals never experimented with gigantism, he lost me entirely. Has he never heard of titanotheres?

Don't forget about the uintatheres too. They were at least as large as brontotheres but they died out by the Late Eocene.

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There is no way I'm reading that entire article... but.... What I did read made no sense.

The (supposed) reason that everything was bigger back then was the levels of oxygen. They were much higher that they are now. Also, oxygenated muscle is much more efficient than oxygen depleted muscle.

How about these people that are convinced that the loch ness monster is a leftover plesiasaur? lol.

Yes, there is a book by Peter Ward, "Out of Thin Air," that looks at how fluctuating oxygen levels across the last 600 million years affected the evolution of life. I read it earlier this year and thought it was interesting though I thought he was fudging his way through the Devonian when some amphibians lived during a time inconvenient to his theory. It is a book worth reading though he pretty much stops at the end of the Cretaceous. I was waiting to see how he would interpret Cenozoic mammal evolution but the book ends rather abruptly without much comment on the post-Cretaceous.

Ward's main point about dinosaur size was that dinosaurs evolved in a low-oxygen environment (as in distinctly lower than that of today) with a respiratory system that was much more efficient at extracting oxygen from air than that of mammals. Birds inherited this system from dinosaurs, explaining why some modern birds can fly well above Mt. Everest while human climbers gasp and wheeze as they crawl to reach the peak.

Anyway, the member starting this topic should have asked these questions in separate threads because it is the longest post I've seen on here. He does himself a disservice. Also, with all the quotes on sizes it would be nice to see some citations to his references. Otherwise, it all comes across as another episode of "Monsterquest" as you noted.

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Yes, there is a book by Peter Ward, "Out of Thin Air," that looks at how fluctuating oxygen levels across the last 600 million years affected the evolution of life. I read it earlier this year and thought it was interesting though I thought he was fudging his way through the Devonian when some amphibians lived during a time inconvenient to his theory. It is a book worth reading though he pretty much stops at the end of the Cretaceous. I was waiting to see how he would interpret Cenozoic mammal evolution but the book ends rather abruptly without much comment on the post-Cretaceous.

Ward's main point about dinosaur size was that dinosaurs evolved in a low-oxygen environment (as in distinctly lower than that of today) with a respiratory system that was much more efficient at extracting oxygen from air than that of mammals. Birds inherited this system from dinosaurs, explaining why some modern birds can fly well above Mt. Everest while human climbers gasp and wheeze as they crawl to reach the peak.

Anyway, the member starting this topic should have asked these questions in separate threads because it is the longest post I've seen on here. He does himself a disservice. Also, with all the quotes on sizes it would be nice to see some citations to his references. Otherwise, it all comes across as another episode of "Monsterquest" as you noted.

this article was part of a pdf. i had to copy it paragraph by paragraph to post it here. it was a real pain in the rump. here's the link to the entire pdf... http://www.anomalist.com/print/TA1.PDF

sorry to give you a brain cramp trying to read so much!

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I'm going to read the entire thing before I make a final comment but there is the problem that the "journal" also has stories of alien writing, astrology and other paranormal phenomena, which lowers the credability of the article to me.

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I'm going to read the entire thing before I make a final comment but there is the problem that the "journal" also has stories of alien writing, astrology and other paranormal phenomena, which lowers the credability of the article to me.

That's awesome. I wonder if the point of the article is too prove that dinosaurs could not have existed unless they could somehow defy gravity and were therefore the ancestors of real fire-breathing, six-armed, flying dragons.

I hear a weird animal sound outside. I know this area like the back of my hand and it could not possibly be a beast I have ever seen. Therefore, it must be a rare encounter with a previously-considered-extinct animal like a sabercat, Gigantopithecus, or Gill-Man.

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The article is pure crackpot science. Let's not forget that the largest animal of all time isn't a dinosaur -- it's the living Blue Whale. The Blue Whale is larger than any dinosaur that ever existed and it is even bigger than any marine reptile of the dinosaur era. By the author's "logic", shouldn't that mean that gravity on Earth must have actually been STRONGER in the past? Also, if any kind of external force (or lack thereof) caused vertebrate gigantism in the Mesozoic, why weren't there marine reptiles bigger than the Blue Whale?

It's also instructive to point out that the whole of the Cenozoic is just a fraction of the time dinosaurs lived on Earth. For nearly their first 100 million years the dinosaurs themselves were no bigger than the bigger mammals that exist today. The real giants aren't found until the late Jurassic, so gigantism in the dinosauria took from the Middle Triassic to the Late Jurassic to happen.

Even worse, the idea that Pangea was somehow "pulled together" by an oddity of gravity from the sun or anywhere else is just ridiculous. As most of us know, Pangea was the result of plate tectonics, a process that is easily observable and which needs no mysterious violations of physics to accomplish.

It's pretty clear that the author has only a weak grasp of everything from paleontology to high school physics and mixes them into a mish-mash of crackpottery that cherry picks facts to substantiate a claim that's so easy to disprove.

Yeah, it's the paleo version of astrology.

“When you're riding in a time machine way far into the future, don't stick your elbow out the window, or it'll turn into a fossil.” - Jack Handy

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