A giraffe's 6-foot neck weighs about 600 pounds. A giraffe's heart is 2 feet long and weighs about 25 pounds. To get the blood up to the animals head its blood pressure is about 2.5 times that of a human
An adult giraffe eats up to 75lbs of foliage a day.

Elephants are the largest living land animals, A full-grown Asian elephant can weigh up to 6 tons and eats approximately 150-200 pounds of food and drinks 30-50 gallons of water every day. Both Asian and African elephants will walk 50 miles daily in search of food and water.
100 elephants will eat 20,000lbs of food per day
1,000 elephants can walk 50 miles a day and in the process consume 200,000 lbs of food and 50,000 gallons of water.


Question: how could the earth have provided sufficient food for creatures that weighed 38 tons and up and are believed to have existed in their hundreds of thousands? - creatures like the Apotasaurus the Brachiosaurus and their contemporaries during the late Jurassic Period the Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, Supersaurus, Seismosaurus and Barosaurus etc. ?

Question: How could creatures of this size have even existed at all?
Answer: they couldn’t.
Apatosaurus:
Length - 70-90 feet
Height - 10-15 feet
Weight - 33-38 tons
Length of neck – 40 feet.

Under the earth’s present gravitational force dinosaurs like the Apotasaurus would not have been able to support its own body weight and it certainly could not have supported the weight of its neck which is believed to have weighed in the order of 6 tons.
The earth in its present size with its available land area could not possibly have supported such large numbers of these creatures.They would have eaten themselves to extinction within several millennia.
The heart in an adult giraffe is about 2% of body weight, whereas in people it's only about half a percent. The blood pressure in the giraffe is about 2½ times what it is in people. Blood pressure is high, that means that the power required to pump a unit amount of blood has to be that much higher, because the power required is the pressure generated, multiplied by the rate of flow.
Apatosaurus and some of the other large sauropods (the huge long-necked plant-eaters) needed to have large, powerful hearts and very high blood pressure in order to pump blood up the long neck to the head and brain. The heads (and brains) of Apatosaurus was held high (many feet) above its heart. This presents a problem in blood-flow engineering. In order to pump enough oxygenated blood to the head to operate Apatosaurus' brain (even its tiny sauropod brain) would require a large, powerful heart, tremendously high blood pressure, and wide, muscular blood vessels with many valves (to prevent the back-flow of blood).
If a 6-7 foot long neck means you have a high blood pressure which is 2 to 2½ per cent of body weight, if you have a 40 foot long neck you have to pump blood up the height of that to the head, then that means you've got to have a heart which is 15% of body weight capable of pumping blood at a pressure of something like 450-500mm of mercury . More than 5 times that of a human.
An adult Apatosaurus weighed something like 40 tons so 15% of that weight is 6 tons. Its heart weighed 6 tons? You have to be kidding.
Remember that the Apatosaurus’ neck was about 40 feet long and weighed about 6 tons and even though it is believed that the Apatosaurus could not raise its head more than about 17 feet above the ground the very similar Brachiosaurus could. The Brachiosaurus is believed to have been able to not only extend its neck to the vertical but also have been able to stand on its hind legs.The Brachiosaurus is believed to have attained the following dimensions and weights:.
Length: Probably up to 85 feet long.
Weight: 33-88 tons.
Neither the Apatosaurus nor the brachiosaurus were water dwellers. Both species are believed to have spent their entire lives on dry land and neither could have been true reptiles for the following reasons:
These creatures had to have been constant feeders. They could not possibly have had the time to seek shade or sun and spend long periods of time stabilising or maintaining their blood temperature. They avoided water which is an ideal heat dissipater and had they been forced to spend long periods of time at rest trying to stabilise their body temperatures they would have been ideal predator targets.
So…the conclusion. Was the earth much larger during the period these creatures existed? And was the earth’s gravitational influence much lower thus allowing creatures of such size to not only exist but to thrive and evolve? Is the earth occasionally undergoing an occasional massive seismic upheaval which not only causes a massive ecological change but also changes in the size of the planet and the distribution of its land mass?

reply one: Once again I theorise....but; I suspect that the larger herbivors were warm blooded. A reptile simply has to spend a great part of its life motionless in order to maintain a stable blood temperature. To allow it to remain motionless for so long it has to do two things: eat a great deal at one sitting and eat a lot of protein. A herbivore simply would not be able to eat sufficient foliage in one go to allow it to rest for any length of time. They had to feed constantly and even if they were omnivorous and could eat meat they would require a massive amount in one feeding in order to allow them to rest for any length of time.

good question, but it is the same as today...how does he earth provide for 7 billion humnas and all the animals? Solar energy used by plants...that is the answer....also, plants grow back

If the earth were shrinking, astronomical recordings from Sumerians and etc. would be inaccurate and we couldn't correlate them to current readings; While it makes less of a fantastical story, we can still match the stars to what the ancients saw; Therefore I don't think the earth is shrinking.

Feel free to poke holes in my reasoning.

ah yes but the question is this: what if this shrinkage takes place as a cataclysmic but intermittent event? a gigantic event of this sort would explain the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs and a whole host of other creatures and the apparent dispacement of the earth's crust that resulted in the formation of the continents that we have today.

Unfortunately an estimated one third of the population of humans on this planet exist in a state of near starvation.
However....imagine this: we humans dont grow our own food. We dont rear animals for meat. We merely scavenge...roaming the face of the earth eating only when nature provides us with the opportunity.
How long would we last?

long enough?

Well scientists are more and more gaining the acceptance that the moon is a chunk of the earth that was blasted away by a mars sized object long long ago. So the earth would have been denser then.

Welcome Fantazum to the UM forum.

the moon thing happened well before the mesozoic.

it is certainly possible to feed lots of dinosaurs. the earth is a pretty big place, and thye fossil record spans millions of years. i doubt they were abundant as say, squirrels. besides, creatures that "scavenge" today, even huge ones, have no trouble getting along on their own. look at how much elephants have to eat. lack of food is not a problem for them, poaching is.

about the sauropods' circulatory system, the model you describe is based upon a giraffe's. if sauropods were built like a giraffe, they would certainly need a gargantuan heart. they may have simply had a very efficient system. maybe they did not need as much oxygen in their brains as mammals do. or look at the creatures that can go for long periods of time with little oxygen. very efficient systems. crocs and whales are good examples of this.

as far as support, the sauropods are built like bridges. the tail provides a nice counter for the long necks. the heads were very small and light, and would not need support outside of the standard vertebrae and musculature.

I dont know of any geological proof at the moment to back the fact that the Earth, might be shrinking. But who knows.

LOL, he said shrinkage.

one problem with your theory...the Conservation of Matter Law...where would of all had gone? It can't shrink, therefore, the earth was the same size back then as right now...+/- a few hundred miles

The points made by Fantazum are true if Sauropods were warm blooded, they would be "impossible" creatures. Using a cold blooded model, instead of a warm blooded giraffe, much less food is required, much less blood pressure, etc. This is why I said on the warm or cold blood thread that only the smallest, birdlike theropod dinosaurs were probably warmbloods, and this is fully compatible with the fossil evidence, in which only these small dinos show any evidence of feather like insulation.

The longest known theropod as well as some sauropods have tall dorsal crests exactly like some clearly cold-blooded lizards for thermoregulation.

(If someone can, please paste this comment in the dino blood thread, as I am not good at this).

Then why is it more and more Palaeontologist's are starting to think that perhaps they were warm blooded?

I don't think that is ture at all Zandore, the lack of nasal tubucles was a huge blow to the warm-blood club, as are the point that when using a mammal model for Sauropods, they become "impossible" creatures.

as cold-blooded, they would need much less food

Theoretically the matter would still be there, the Earth would just be getting denser.

Once again I theorise....but; I suspect that the larger herbivors were warm blooded. A reptile simply has to spend a great part of its life motionless in order to maintain a stable blood temperature. To allow it to remain motionless for so long it has to do two things: eat a great deal at one sitting and eat a lot of protein. A herbivore simply would not be able to eat sufficient foliage in one go to allow it to rest for any length of time. They had to feed constantly and even if they were omnivorous and could eat meat they would require a massive amount in one feeding in order to allow them to rest for any length of time.

It sounds like you are getting all of your information about reptiles from people like Horner and Bakker tryhing to sell their "warm blood dino books". I have kept reptiles for pets for many years, and have spent much time obseving them in the wild as well. Monitors for example, are very active lizards, with a very high metabolism. In the wild, they are constantly on the prowl foraging for food exactly like Mammals. It is a mistake to brand reptiles as being slow and lethargic simply from the fact they are cold blooded, and observing captive animals who have given up trying to escape so remain fairly inactive in their cages. Yes, the lifestyle of some reptiles is fairly static, but this is also true of some mammals.

Key words...."don't think".
What source references are you using for this "opinion"?
Or is it you are just ignoring science?



As apposed to you trying to sell your book?

One of the biggest problems I see with this comment is....there are how many millions of years between now and when there were dinosaurs around? You want to compare the two!

why are we measuring sauropods on the mammalian system anyway? don't we have long necked, warm blooded birds to look at?

emus and ostriches are something to think about.

Good point!
As I said in my previous post "there are how many millions of years between now and when there were dinosaurs around" and some one here wants to compare cross species (mammalian/lizard) bio-systems between the two!


Closest living descendents and they are warm blooded.....Points to ponder!

Perhaps they evolved to fit the current environmental temperatures, thus having warm blood.

If I am not mistaken back in the dinosaur age the Earth was a bit warmer and the CO2 levels (not to mention the methane levels) were higher also.

sorry to break your WHOLE thing down, you did some nice info on animals but you, messed up in an easy area, incase you forgot no buildings or nothing was around, so there was TONS to eat, and that's how they also died during the ice age, most plants died and most dinos died, first leaf eaters, then meat eaters.

The nasal passage thing was a very scholarly and scientific study published in the most prestigious magazines. Apparently all warmblooded animals have them but dinos don't.

As far as reptile "changing" in 60 million years, I don't buy that for many turtles, crocs and lizards are virtually the same now as they were then.

People like to say birds are the closest relatives to dinosaurs, but serious paleontologists admit they learn more about dinos from crocs than they do from birds, such as determining the sex from bone structures in crocs, something you can't do with birds. The raptor to bird thing is nonsense. It is called convergent evolution. A good example is phytosaurs and crocodiles, or tuataras and lizards. In both cases the two animals look very much the same, but actually are very different. Also consider the resemblence of ichthyosaurs to bottle nosed dolphins.

What most people don't realize is that raptors did not evolve into birds, there were already very modern birds fully evolved at the same time as raptors. We still do not know if the raptors had true feathers like archaeoptyrex. Some seem to have a fringe that may be like the "hair" on some pterosaur bodies.

I had not heard of horner or bakker until you mentioned them....thanks for the link. My theory that the larger herbivorous dinosaurs were warm blooded does not mean that they were mammals.
We think in terms of evolved species ie - its either a mammal or it isnt. But we dont take into account the possibility of transitional species - creatures that bore the attributes of both reptiles and mammals.

yes thats a good question. If the earth is indeed experiencing some kind of shrinkage due to an internal collapse of some sort then the resulting volcanic and seismic action on the surface would be of an unimaginable scale.
Firstly - some stars shrink when they begin to die. What happens to the mass? - it is condensed and continues to be condensed to the point where the star becomes what some suspect to be a "black hole"
However we dont live on a star and its not dying but that doesnt mean to say that mass could not become more dense.
Most of that material may still be here. When an apple begins to deteriorate it shrinks and the surface skin folds. The Tibetan plateau the Himalayas, the Andes, the Alps, the Urals etc etc could be examples of those folds.
A great deal of the matter that is directly involved in the volcanic action is simply vaporised and enters the atmosphere. Most is ash which is deposited again on the surface but a great deal of that material would be vaporised and might enter the atmosphere as water ....which could explain why this tiny planet has such a disproportionate amount of water on its surface.

Good point but did you know that many scientists now suspect that during the period of the larger dinosaurs, oxygen levels were much higher which they believe may have allowed such large creatures to have developed.?

I thought the original point of this thread you were trying to make was that if the huge Sauropods followed a Mammalian physiology, they would be "impossible" creatures. I think you may find it the same with a "bird" model. I recall at least one scientific article that came to the conclusion that in order for a warm blooded Sauropod to keep "fueled", it would have to eat constantly over 48 hours a day, and unfortunately there are only 24 hours in a day! There is really no reason to doubt some dinos could have been warm and some cold blooded. It makes the most sense if Sauropods were cold blooded.

What type of magazines published these studies? Religious based vs Scientific based?


AH...An opinion!


I got to call you on this one! References please?

I've always ponder on this theory, but mines a little different, I think the earth gravity is not as strong as now. Otherwise why is everything growing in gigantic size? even dragonflies are a foot long. And how can those giant birds fly?

Maybe the earth spins faster? or something that cost the gravity to be lighter.

I don't think it has anything to do with gravity at all, if you look at evidence through ice extravated in the north (or south) pole, it proves that the oxygen levels were much higher than the oxygen levels are today. and more oxygen means more oxygen in your blood stream, thus allowing the dinosuars to grow to a large extent.

plus the food issues, remember, there were no deforestation so the whole world was either thick forest and deserts in various places. and then the food cycle kept it all in balance (plants > herbavores > carnivores > carnivores die > rot > food for plants )

It's true that our planet could theoreticaly become more dense, but I don't think the comparison to a star is apt. The only thing which prevents our sun from collapsing right now is the energy being released through nuclear fusion, which produces an outward thrust. Take that away, and it will collapse in upon itself in a heartbeat.

Our earth is not now producing nuclear fusion at its core, nor has it ever done so. Furthermore, most of the earth is iron (atomic weight 55.845 grams/mol), whereas most of the sun is hydrogen (atomic weight approximately 1 gram/mol). It would take considerably more energy, reletively speaking, to produce the same effect on the earth.

For the earth to actually contract and become more dense would require a world-shattering event, one which we have no reason to believe ever happened.



These features can already be explained adequately through plate tectonics.

As for the underlying theory that earth's gravity was lesser in the distant past, gravity is not a force to be dealt with lightly, as it has far-reaching environmental effects. If earth's gravity was lower, then the moon was either much closer, or moving much more slowly. In either case, some mysterious force would have had to adjust the orbit (speeding the moon up or pushing it farther away) and then stabalize it in its new position. There is no evidence for this. In fact, the moon's orbit is more regular than the earth's, and shows no signs at all of ever having been different.

Lower gravity also means lower air pressure. This makes flight far more difficult, more than would be offset by the reduced force of gravity. Some flying creatures undoubtably would no longer be able to maintain their flight under these conditions (Quzelcoatlus). It would also cause earth's atmosphere to become thinner, reducing its oxygen and nitrogen content as the lighter elements are lost to the cosmos or pushed higher into the stratosphere. Again, this offsets the gains of reduced weight and contradicts fossil evidence.

Under lower gravity, dinosaurs would bound across the landscape with a springy step, which is not evident in fossilized dinosaur tracks.

In short, this theory purports to solve one problem (size) but creatures numerous other problems in the process. Until these issues are addressed I do not believe the idea of a lower-gravity planet can be considered plausible.

-Pilgrim

Pilgrim just about summed it up

o2 is one thing to make them grow so large, but how do they support thier body mass? how could all these giants took to the skies? even trees were huge.

If they lived thier life on O2 booast then I'm sure thier metabolism rate is high too, they would need more food to survive.

I still suspect something to do with gravity, cos look at the Ornithocheirus wingspan 12m and body lenght 3.5m weight up to 100kgs. From the propotion of the wingspan we know these things do fly unlike ostrish just a wannabe bird. But in terms of physics is it possible for these birds to actually take off?

Land walking dinosaur up to 40m+ in lenght and what about weight? how could this things actually support itself?

you just answered your own question... Tree's were high, and for herbavores who ate the leaves, had to grow tall to reach them. its called adaption.



why would they? lizards have a slow metabolism. oxygen doesn't make your metabolism any faster or slower.




its theorized they took off on a high gust of wind, they didnt fly like birds, they glided and used updrafts to keep them up in the air.




by its bone structure.

By Paul Recer
AP science writer
WASHINGTON — A previously unknown flying reptile that lived in the age of dinosaurs sported a bony crest more than 2 feet high and may have fed by skimming the surface of a lagoon to snatch fish in its long, sharp beak.Maurillio Oliveira, Associated PressThe newly discovered pterosaur may have caught fish on the fly. Researchers unearthed a nearly intact fossil skull of the animal near the town of Santan do Cariri in northeastern Brazil. The scientists said the animal lived about 110 million years ago, spending its life soaring on 15-foot wings over a land dominated by lumbering dinosaurs.
In a study appearing Friday in the journal Science, researchers Alexander W.A. Kellner and Diogenes de Almeida Campos say the animal is a new kind of pterosaur, a type of reptile that flew on large wings of furry skin, dipping and diving at speeds of up 25 mph to catch fish on the fly. Pterosaurs are the largest flying animals known.
The researchers named the new pterosaur Thalassodromeus sethi. The first word is Greek for "sea runner" and the second honors the ancient Egyptian god Seth.
The animal is thought to have lived on the shores of an ancient lagoon, called the Araripe, not far from the ocean.
Kellner and de Almeida Campos said in Science that the pterosaur's 4-foot-long skull was topped with a hollow bony crest that rose 31 inches from the top of its head and may have acted like a rudder as the large animal flew.
The crest fossil is marked with grooves from blood vessels, suggesting that the top knot also helped keep the animal cool, the researchers say. The blood vessels would have been near the skin's surface, allowing body heat to escape easily into the atmosphere.
The sea runner's jaw resembles a modern bird, called a skimmer, that captures its prey by gliding across the surface of a pool and dipping its beak.
To feed, the authors suggest that Thalassodromeus dropped toward the water in a long swooping glide and then dipped its head and closed its toothed beak around an unwary fish swimming near the surface.
"The scissorslike bill of Thalassodromeus almost precludes any other method of capturing prey," the authors wrote.
Marks in the fossilized skull suggest the sea runner had powerful neck muscles, giving it the strength needed to capture a fish on the fly.
Kellner is with the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. De Almeida Campos is with the Museum of Earth Sciences, also in Rio. Both are associate researchers at the American Museum of Natural History.
Alan Feduccia, a dinosaur expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the authors "have done a splendid job of bringing this large and remarkable ... pterosaur back to life."
He agrees that the animal probably was a skimmer, but questions the authors' interpretation that Thalassodromeus' large crest was for body cooling. Feduccia said there are modern birds, such as the hornbill, with large bony crowns that contain blood vessels used to nourish the head and not for cooling.
But despite the disagreement, Feduccia marvels: "One can only imagine the incredible sight of these flying reptiles skimming the Araripe lagoon some 110 million years ago."
Fossils of pterosaurs are more uncommon than the remains of many other animals from the age of dinosaurs. As with modern flying birds, the bones of pterosaurs were thin and usually didn't survive as fossils. The Araripe Basin, where Thalassodromeus was found, contains one of the largest deposits in the world of pterosaur fossils.
Pterosaurs ranged in size from sparrow-sized creatures up to massive fliers like Thalassodromeus. Unlike birds, the wings of pterosaurs had no feathers. Instead, there was a single long finger-like bone extending from a wrist that stretched a thin membrane that provided the aerodynamic lift to give the animal flight.
The fossils of another large pterosaur, called Pteranodon, has been found in Texas and Kansas. That animal is thought to have had a wing span of 23 feet and it, too, had a bony head crest, although smaller than that of Thalassodromeus.
Pterosaurs became extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs, about 65 million years ago.

So..is anyone seriously suggesting that a creature with a wingspan of 23ft can skim over the waters of a lake catching insects in its beak can do so simply by relying on air-updrafts? lolololol[b]

The earliest flying insects found so far belonged to Order Protodonata. Though now extinct, these creatures were closely related to the present-day Order Odonata to which the dragonfly belongs. Indeed, the first winged insects in the fossil record are very similar in structure to the dragonfly we know today, a creature that has changed little for the past 200 million years. The earliest dragonflies, however, were much larger than modern species. The biggest example ever found had a wingspan of 30 inches (76 cm), or two and a half feet! This early dragonfly was discovered in France and was four times as large as any dragonfly species living today.

By the way -the gravitational pull on a person standing on the top of mount everest is the same as at the bottom but the atmospheric pressure at the top of everest is considerably lower than it is at the base.

Sauropods may have been both cold and warm blooded. Warm blooded when they were foraging and cold blooded when they were brooding their eggs. Anyone ever considered that some dinosaurs may have embodied the physiology of both ectotherms and endotherms?

Which is true - mostly. Gravity does, in fact, change at high altitude, but the difference is so incredibly slight that it isn't worth mentioning. Air pressure, meanwhile, changes not only with elevation, but also the day-to-day conditions in a given area, and is not constant. It averages around 101.3 kPa at sea level.

However, air pressure drops rapidly with a loss of gravity. The average air pressure on Mars is lower than the lowest recorded pressure on earth. This might not be enough to prevent flight, but it does offset the gains of having lower gravity. Besides which, it has been proven that even the largest pteranodons could, in fact, fly under normal earth conditions. Quetzalcoatlus had a wingspan estimated between 30 and 40 feet, yet it was able to fly. In fact, even the largest pteranodons are only estimated to have weighed about 50 pounds or so. Huge, yes, but extremely light for their size.

All of which is a moot point anyway as there are far too many problems with the theory that gravity was significantly different at that time. For starters, there is the issue with the moon - it certainly didn't crash into the earth or fly off into space, and it shows no evidence of having ever been in a different orbit than today. Nor does it show evidence of having been struck by a rouge planetoid or other celestial body, not that such a collision would have been able to stabalize the orbit after the fact.

-Pilgrim

EDIT: Corrected the size of the wingspan.

Pterosaurs were VERY LIGHT, that is how they were able to fly. It was the bone structure of dinos that held them up.

http://www.abc.net.au/dinosaurs/fact_files/sky/ornithoch.htm

How do you explain this? it weight estimation at 100kgs, wingspan of 40feet, body size of 11feet.

Dragonflies at 2.1/2 feet size?

And why when I mention lighter gravity then 100tons dinosaurs must float around like party baloons? Maybe 20% or 30% lighter in gravity? And I believe neither science can proof the earth gravity wasnt lighter.

Isn't it worth investigating why everything grows to enormous size and yet can take off?

I doubt they grew to 100 kg...Plus, with their large surface area of the wing, they can catch updrafts and currents easier...Flying would also be easier.

From the page you linked:

"Ornithocheirus had the wing area of a small aeroplane, yet because of its hollow bones, its body probably weighed less than a human."

Emphasis mine. 100 kg equates to 220 pounds, which is considerably heavier than an average human (male or female). The weight estimation of up to 100 kg means just that - estimates range up to 100 kg. This is the very highest estimate that is commonly accepted; in reality, the average weight was probably much less.

A reduction of 30% of gravity is not a small amount. Mars has approximately 60% of earth's gravity (40% less), with an atmosphere so thin that only heavy gasses like carbon dioxide remain in any large quantities. Indeed, a planet much smaller than mars likely wouldn't have an atmosphere at all.

As to the question of dinosaurs floating about like "party balloons", I don't believe that's what I said, but if it appears that way, I appologize. That was not my intention. Rather, I meerly meant that under lower gravity a dinosaur's gait would be considerably different, as their muscle mass remains the same but it is now pushing off against considerably less weight. Consider, for example, a rather athletic human who weighs 180 pounds. With a 30% reduction in gravity, their weight drops to 126 pounds, but they retain the same amount of muscle. This will result in a considerable increase in speed. Instead of a steady trot-trot-trot, our runner now bounds across the track, with each step carrying them farther than before. They do not "float away" or "bounce", but travel farther horizontally. This creates a greatly elongated series of tracks, a pattern which is not visible in known dinosaur tracks.

Also, not to beat on a dead horse, but there is still that pesky moon issue. If the moon existed in a stable orbit under reduced gravity, then it would have crashed into the surface of the planet when gravity reverted to the normal amount we know today. If it existed in its current orbit under reduced gravity, it would have broken free. Thus, either the moon's orbit somehow changed, or it was snagged by the earth sometime within the last 100 million years. The highly regular orbit of the moon suggests quite strongly that it has been in its current orbit for at least the past 2 billion years.

It isn't that science simply ignores the question of why dinosaurs were so big when modern animals are not. It is simply that this explanation cannot fit the observed data.

-Pilgrim

Yes they have considered that possibility.

[url=http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/endothermy.html]The Evidence for
Endothermy in Dinosaurs[/url]

Interesting article worth the time reading:

Megafauna and the attenuated gravity of the antique system.
Copyright Ted Holden
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is a fairly easy demonstration that nothing any larger than the largest elephants could live in our world today, and that the largest dinosaurs survived ONLY because the nature of the world and of the solar system was then such that they did not experience gravity as we do at all; they'd be crushed by their own weight, collapse in a heap, and suffocate within minutes were they to.
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. Fossil finds dating from the 1970's dwarf him. The Avon field Guide to Dinosaurs shows a brachiosaur (larger than a brontosaur), a supersaur, and an ultrasaur juxtaposed, and the ultrasaur dwarfs the others. Christopher McGowan's "DINOSAURS, SPITFIRES, & SEA DRAGONS", Harvard, 1991 cites a 180 ton weight estimate for the ultrasaur (page 118), and (page 104) describes the volume-based methods of estimating dinosaur weights. McGowan is Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum.


This same look requires that dinosaur lifting requirements be compared to human lifting capabilities. One objection which might be raised to this would be that animal muscle tissue was somehow "better" than that of humans. This, however, is known not to be the case; for instance, from Knut Nielson's, "Scaling, Why is Animal size So Important", Cambridge Univ Press, 1984, page 163, we have:


"It appears that the maximum force or stress that can be exerted by any muscle is inherent in the structure of the muscle filaments. The maximum force is roughly 4 to 4 kgf/cm2 cross section of muscle (300 - 400 kN/m2). This force is body-size independent and is the same for mouse and elephant muscle. The reason for this uniformity is that the dimensions of the thick and thin muscle filaments, and also the number of cross-bridges between them are the same. In fact the structure of mouse muscle and elephant muscle is so similar that a microscopist would have difficulty identifying them except for a larger number of mitrochondria in the smaller animal. This uniformity in maximum force holds not only for higher vertebrates, but for many other organisms, including at least some, but not all invertebrates."
Another objection might be that sauropods were aquatic creatures. 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 would be that dinosaurs were somehow more "efficient" than top human athletes, or had better "leverage". Superposed images of sauropods and powerlifters at roughly equal-weight sizes show the sauropod's legs to be puny compared to the human athletes', as one would expect, since the sauropod's body was mostly digestive system, the humans's mostly muscle. The better-leverage argument would require the sauropod to be a spectacularly knob-kneed sort of a creature whose knees and other joints were wider than those of the human athletes, even though the rest of their legs were spindly by contrast with the humans. A quick look at the pictures dispels this.

By "scaled lift", I mean of course 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 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. The normal inverse operator for this is to simply divide by 2/3 power of body weight, and this is indeed the normal scaling factor for all weight lifting events, i.e. it lets us tell if a 200 lb. athlete has actually done a "better" lift than the champion of the 180 lb. group. For athletes roughly between 160 and 220 lbs, i.e. whose bodies are fairly similar, these scaled lift numbers line up very nicely. It is then fairly easily seen that a lift for a scaled up version of one particular athlete can be computed via this formula, since the similarity will be perfect, scaling being the only difference.

Consider the case of Bill Kazmaier, the king of the power lifters in the seventies and eighties. Power lifters are, in the author's estimation, the strongest of all athletes; they concentrate on the three most difficult total-body lifts, i.e. benchpress, squat, and dead-lift. They work out many hours a day and, it is fairly common knowledge, use food to flavor their anabolic steroids with. 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 1000 and 1100 lb. on a bar, assuming he was fully warmed up.


Standing Up at 70,000 lb.
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 1000 lb. squat. Consider, however, what would happen to Mr. Kazmaier, were he to be scaled up to 70,000 lb., the weight commonly given for the brontosaur. Kazmaier's maximum effort at standing, fully warmed up, assuming the 1000 lb. squat, was 1340 lb. (1000 for the bar and 340 for himself). The scaled maximum lift would be a solution to:
1340/340^.667 = x/70,000^667 or 47,558 lb..
He'd not be able to lift his weight off the ground!
A sauropod dinosaur had four legs you might say; what happens if Mr. Kazmaier uses arms AND legs at 70,000 lb.. 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 doesn't even matter. A near maximum benchpress effort for Mr. Kazmaier would fall around 600 lb.. This merely changes the 1340 to 1940 in the equation above, and the answer comes out as 68,853. 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 lb.!

Moreover, Kazmaier is using glutteal and lower back muscles in the squat, and pectorals in the benchpress, i.e. extra muscle groups which the sauropod he is being compared to would not be assisted by in standing. Any tiny advantage in leverage which a sauropod might have over the human lifter for any reason, would be overwhelmed by the huge edge in available musculature and the usage of the extra muscle groups on the part of the human in the comparison.

To believe then, that a brontosaur could stand at 70,000 lb., one has to believe that a creature whose weight was largely gut and the vast digestive mechanism involved in processing huge amounts of low-value foodstuffs, was somehow stronger than a creature its size which was almost entirely muscle, and that far better trained and conditioned than would ever be found amongst grazing animals. That is not only ludicrous in the case of the brontosaur, but the calculations only get worse when you begin trying to scale upwards to the supersaur and ultrasaur at their sizes.

How heavy can an animal still 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 just to stand up as it is for him to do 1000 lb. squats at his present size of 340 lb.? The answer is simply the solution to:

1340/340^.667 = x/x^.667
or just under 21,000 lb.. In reality, elephants do not appear to get quite to that point. McGowan (DINOSAURS, SPITFIRES, & SEA DRAGONS, p. 97) claims that a Toronto Zoo specimen was the largest in North America at 14,300 lb., and Smithsonian personnel once informed the author that the gigantic bush elephant specimen which appears at their Museum of Natural History weighed around 8 tons.
Again, in all cases, we are comparing the absolute max effort for a human weight lifter to lift and hold something for two seconds versus the sauropod's requirement to move around and walk all day long with scaled weight greater than these weights involved in the maximum, one-shot, two-second effort. That just can't happen.

Sauropod Dinosaurs' Necks
A second category of evidence for attenuated felt effect of gravity in antediluvian times arises from the study of sauropod dinosaurs' necks. Scientists who study sauropod dinosaurs are now claiming that they held their heads low, because they could not have gotten blood to their brains had they held them high. McGowan (again, DINOSAURS, SPITFIRES, & SEA DRAGONS) goes into this in detail (pages 101 - 120). He mentions the fact that a giraffe's blood pressure, at 200 - 300 mm Hg, far higher than that of any other animal, would probably rupture the vascular system of any other animal, and is maintained by thick arterial walls and by a very tight skin which apparently acts like a jet pilot's pressure suit. A giraffe's head might reach to 20'. How a sauropod might have gotten blood to its brain at 50' or 60' is the real question.
Two articles which mention this problem appeared in the 12/91 issue of Natural History. In "Sauropods and Gravity", Harvey B. Lillywhite of Univ. Fla., Gainesville, notes:

"...in a Barosaurus with its head held high, the heart had to work against a gravitational pressure of about 590 mm of mercury (Hg). In order for the heart to eject blood into the arteries of the neck, its pressure must exceed that of the blood pushing against the opposite side of the outflow valve. Moreover, some additional pressure would have been needed to overcome the resistance of smaller vessels within the head for blood flow to meet the requirements for brain and facial tissues. Therefore, hearts of Barosaurus must have generated pressures at least six times greater than those of humans and three to four times greater than those of giraffes."
In the same issue of Natural History, Peter Dodson ("Lifestyles of the Huge and Famous"), mentions that:
"Brachiosaurus was built like a giraffe and may have fed like one. But most sauropods were built quite differently. At the base of the neck, 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 (see opposite page) [Lillywhite's article] and would seemingly have placed the animal at severe risk of a stroke, an aneurysm, or some other circulatory disaster. If sauropods fed with the neck extended just a little above heart level, say from ground level up to fifteen feet, the blood pressure required would have been far more reasonable."
Dodson is neglecting what appears to be a dilemma in the case of the brachiosaur, but there are at least two far greater dilemmas here. One is that the good leaves were, in all likelihood, above the 20' mark; holding his head out at 20', an ultrasaur would, in all likelihood, starve.
Moreover, it turns out that a problem every bit as bad or worse than the blood pressure problem would arise, perceived gravity being what it is now, were sauropods to hold their heads out just above horizontally as Dodson and others are suggesting. Try holding your arm out horizontally for more than a minute or two, and then imagine your arm being 40' long and 30,000 lb......

An ultrasaur or seismosaur with a neck 40' - 60' long and weighing 25000 - 40000 lb., would be looking at 400,000 to nearly a million foot pounds of torque were one of them to try to hold his neck out horizontally. That's crazy. You don't hang a 30,000 lb load 40' off into space even if it is made out of wood and structural materials, much less flesh and blood. No building inspector in America could be bribed sufficiently to let you build such a thing.

In fact, a cursory look at an elephant's skeleton reveals a structural system much like Roman archicture with one and only one purpose in mind, i.e. bearing the elephant's great weight. The legs are columns and the spine is a Roman arch. A sauropod's neck, however, particularly in the case of the recent ultrasaur and seismosaur finds, weighed several times the weight of a large elephant and, if held outwards horizontally, would actually arch downwards (the wrong way). Reconstructions actually depict them like that, no thought whatever having been taken as to the consequences, either by the scientists or the artists involved.

And so, sauropods (in our gravity) couldn't hold their heads up, and they couldn't hold them out either. That doesn't leave much.

Antediluvian Flying Creatures
A third category of evidence for attenuated felt effect of gravity in antediluvian times arises from studies of creatures which flew in those times, and of creatures which fly now.
In the antediluvian world, 350 lb flying creatures soared in skies which no longer permit flying creatures above 30 lb. or so. Modern birds of prey (the Argentinean teratorn) weighing 170 -200 lb. with wingspans of 30' 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 lb. or thereabouts. At that point 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 lb. or so flies anymore, and those creatures, albatrosses and a few of the largest condors and eagles, are marginal. Albatrosses in particular are called "gooney birds" by sailors because of the extreme difficulty they experience taking off and landing, their landings being (badly) controlled crashes, and all of this despite long wings made for maximum lift.

The felt effect of the force of gravity on earth was much less in remote times, and only this allowed such giant creatures to fly. No flying creature has since RE-EVOLVED into anything like former sizes, and the one or two birds which have retained such sizes have forfeited any thought of flight, their wings becoming vestigial.

A book of interest here is Adrian Desmond's "The Hot Blooded Dinosaurs. Desmond has a good deal to say about the pteranodon, the 40 - 50 lb. pterosaur which scientists used to believe to be the largest creature which ever flew:

"Pteranodon had lost its teeth, tail and some flight musculature, and its rear legs had become spindly. It was, however, in the actual bones that the greatest reduction of weight was achieved. The wing bones, backbone and hind limbs were tubular, like the supporting struts of an aircraft, which allows for strength yet cuts down on weight. In Pteranodon these bones, although up to an inch in diameter, were no more than cylindrical air spaces bounded by an outer bony casing no thicker than a piece of card. Barnum Brown of the American Museum reported an armbone fragment of an unknown species of pterosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Texas in which 'the culmination of the pterosaur... the acme of light construction' was achieved. Here, the trend had continued so far that the bone wall of the cylinder was an unbelievable one-fiftieth of an inch thick Inside the tubes bony crosswise struts no thicker than pins helped to strengthen the structure, another innovation in aircraft design anticipated by the Mesozoic pterosaurs.
The combination of great size and negligible weight must necessarily have resulted in some fragility. It is easy to imagine that the paper-thin tubular bones supporting the gigantic wings would have made landing dangerous. 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 twelve-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 twenty-three foot wingspread, Pteranodon would have required 220 lb. of flight muscles as efficient as those in humming birds. But it had reduced its musculature to about 8 lb., so it is inconceivable that Pteranodon could have taken off actively.

Pteranodon, then, was not a flapping creature, it had neither the muscles nor the resistance to the resulting stress. Its long, thin albatross-like wings betray it as a glider, the most advanced glider the animal kingdom has produced. With a weight of only 40 lb. the wing loading was only I lb. per square foot. This gave it a slower sinking speed than even a man-made glider, where the wings have to sustain a weight of at least 4 lb. per square foot. The ratio of wing area to total weight in Pteranodon is only surpassed in some of the insects. Pteranodon was constructed as a glider, with the breastbone, shoulder girdle and backbone welded into a box-like rigid fuselage, able to absorb the strain from the giant wings. The low weight combined with an enormous wing span meant that Pteranodon could glide at ultra-low speeds without fear of stalling. Cherrie Bramwell of Reading University has calculated that it could remain aloft at only 15 m.p.h. So takeoff would have been relatively easy. All Pteranodon needed was a breeze of 15 m.p.h. when it would face the wind, stretch its wings and be lifted into the air like a piece of paper. No effort at all would have been required. Again, if it was forced to land on the sea, it had only to extend its wings to catch the wind in order to raise itself gently out of the water. It seems strange that an animal that had gone to such great lengths to reduce its weight to a minimum should have evolved an elongated bony crest on its skull."

Desmond has mentioned some of the problems which even the pteranodon faced at fifty lb. or so; no possibility of flapping the wings for instance. The giant teratorn finds of Argentina were not known when the book was written... they came out in the eighties in issues of Science Magazine and other places. The terotorn was a 160 - 200 lb eagle with a 27' wingspan, a modern bird whose existence involved flapping wings, aerial maneuver etc. How so? There are a couple of other problems which Desmond does not mention, including the fact that life for a pure glider would be almost impossible in the real world, and that some limited flying ability would be necessary for any aerial creature. Living totally at the mercy of the winds, a creature might never get back home to its nest and children given the first contrary wind.
There is one other problem. Desmond notes a fairly reasonably modus operandi for the pteranodon, i.e. that it had a throat pouch like a pelican, has been found with fish fossils indicating a pelican-like existence, soaring over the waves and snapping up fish without landing. That should indicate that, peculiarly amongst all of the creatures of the earth, the pteranodon should have been practically IMMUNE from the great extinctions of past ages. Velikovsky noted that large animals had the greatest difficulty getting to high ground and other safe havens at the times of floods and the global catastrophes of past ages and were therefore peculiarly susceptible to extinction. Ovid notes (Metamorphoses) that men and animals hid on mountain tops during the deluge, but that most died from lack of food during the hard year following. 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; the notion that pteranodon died out when the felt effect of gravity on earth changed after the flood is the only good explanation.

Back to Adrian Desmond for more on size as related to pterosaurs now:

"It would be a grave understatement to say that, as a flying creature, Pteranodon was large. Indeed, there were sound reasons for believing that it was the largest animal that ever could become airborne. With each increase in size, and therefore also weight, a flying animal 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 lb.: Pteranodon and its slightly larger but lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx were therefore thought to be the largest flying animals."
Notice that the calculations mentioned say about 50 lb. is max for either a flier or a glider, and that experience from our present world absolutely coincides with this and, in fact, don't go quite that high; the biggest flying creatures which we actually see are albatrosses, geese etc. at around 30 - 35 lb.. Similarly, my calculations say that about 20000 lb. would be the largest theoretically possible land animal in our present world, and Jumbo the stuffed elephant which I've mentioned, the largest known land animal from our present world, was around 16000.
"But in 1972 the first of a spectacular series of finds suggested that we must drastically rethink our ideas on the maximum size permissible in flying - vertebrates. Although excavations are still in progress, three seasons' digging - from 1972 to 1974 - by Douglas A. Lawson of the University of California has revealed partial skeletons of three ultra-large pterosaurs in the Big Bend National Park in Brewster County, Texas These skeletons indicate creatures that must have dwarfed even Pteranodon. Lawson found the remains off four wings, a long neck, hind legs and toothless jaws in deposits that were non-marine; the ancient entombing sediments are thought to have been made instead by floodplain silting. The immense size of the Big Bend pterosaurs, which have already become known affectionately in the palaeontological world as '747s' or 'Jumbos', may be gauged by setting one of the Texas upper arm bones alongside that of a Pteranodon: the 'Jumbo' humerus is fully twice the length of Pteranodon's. Lawson's computer estimated wingspan for this living glider is over fifty feet It is no surprise, says Lawson announcing the animal in Science in 1975, that the definitive remains of this creature were found in Texas.
Unlike Pteranodon, these creatures were found in rocks that were formed 250 miles inland of the Cretaceous coastline. The lack of even lake deposits in the vicinity militates against these particular pterosaurs having been fishers. Lawson suggests that they were carrion feeders, gorging themselves on the rotting mounds of flesh left after the dismembering of a dinosaur carcass. Perhaps, like vultures and condors, these pterosaurs hung in the air over the corpse waiting their turn. Having alighted on the carcass, their toothless beaks would have restricted them to feeding upon the soft, pulpy internal organs. How they could have taken to the air after gorging themselves is something of a puzzle. 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 takeoff 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. Is the only solution to suppose that, with wings fully extended and elevators raised, they were lifted passively off the ground by the wind? If Lawson is correct and the Texas pterosaurs were carrion feeders another problem is envisaged. Dinosaur carcasses imply the presence of dinosaurs. The ungainly Brobdignagian pterosaurs were vulnerable to attack when grounded, so how did they escape the formidable dinosaurs? Left at the mercy of wind currents, takeoff would have been a chancy business. Lawson's exotic pterosaurs raise some intriguing questions. Only continued research will provide the answers."

Note that Desmond mentions a number of ancillary problems, any of which would throw doubt on the pterosaur's ability to exist as mentioned, and neglects the biggest question of all: the calculations which say 50 lb. are max have not been shown to be in error; we have simply discovered larger creatures. Much larger. This is what is called a dilemma.
Then I come to what Robert T. Bakker has to say about the Texas Pterosaurs ("The Dinosaur heresies", Zebra Books, pp 290-291:

"Immediately after their paper came out in Science, Wann Langston and his students were attacked by aeronautical engineers who simply could not believe that the big Bend dragon had a wingspan of forty feet or more. Such dimensions broke all the rules of flight engineering; a creature that large would have broken its arm bones if it tried to fly... Under this hail of disbelief, Langston and his crew backed off somewhat. Since the complete wing bones hadn't been discovered, it was possible to reconstruct the Big Bend Pterodactyl [pterosaur] with wings much shorter than fifty feet."
The original reconstruction had put wingspan for the pterosaur at over 60'. Bakker goes on to say that he believes the pterosaurs really were that big and that they simply flew despite our not comprehending how, i.e. that the problem is ours. He does not give a solution as to what we're looking at the wrong way.
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 lb. eagle?

David Bruce's "Bird of Jove", Ballentine Books, 1971, describes the adventures of Sam Barnes, one of England's top falconers at the time, who actually brought a Berkut eagle out of Kirghiz country to his home in Pwllheli, Wales. Berkuts are the biggest eagles, and Atlanta, the particular eagle which Barnes brought back, at 26 lb. in flying trim, is believed to be as large as they ever get. These, as Khan Chalsan explained to Barnes, 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 eagle Barnes brought back had a disease for which no cure was available in Kirghiz, and was near to death then, otherwise there would have been no question of his having her. Chalsan explained that a Berkut of Atlanta's size would normally be worth more than a dozen of the most beautiful women in his country.

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 Chalsan told him of her killing 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" talons, however, a wolf is a major-league deal for an average sized Berkut at 15 - 20 lb.. Chalsan explained that wolves occasionally win these battles, and that he had once seen a wolf kill three of the birds before the fourth killed him. Quite obviously, there would be an advantage to having the birds be bigger, i.e. to having the average berkut be 25 lb., and a big one be 40 or 50.

It has never been done, however, despite all of the efforts since the days of Chengis Khan. We have Chengis Khan's famous "What is best in life..." quote, and the typical Mongol reply from one of his captains involved falconry. They regarded it as important. Chengis Khan, Oktai, Kuyuk, Hulagu, Batui, Monke, Kubilai et. al. were all into this sport big time, they all wanted these birds big, since they flew them at everything from wolves and deer (a big berkut like Atlanta can drive its talons in around a wolf's spine and snap it) to leopards and tigers, and there was no lack of funds for the breeding program involved. Chengis Khan did not suffer from poverty.

Moreover, the breeding of berkuts has continued apace from that day to this, including a 200 year stretch during which those people ruled almost all of the world which you'd care to own at the time, and they never got them any bigger than 25 lb. or so.

Remember Desmond's words regarding the difficulty which increasingly larger birds will experience getting airborne from flat ground? Atlanta was powerful enough in flight, but she was not easily able to take off from flat ground. Barnes noted one instance in which a town crank attacked Atlanta with a cane and the great bird had to frantically run until it found a sand dune from which to launch herself. This could mean disaster in the wild. A bird of prey will often come to ground with prey, and if she can't take off from flat ground to avoid trouble once in awhile... it would only take once. Khan Chalsan had explained the necessity of having the birds in captivity for certain periods, and nesting wild at other times. A bird bigger than Atlanta would not survive the other times.

One variety of teratorn, however, judging from pictures which have appeared in the December 1980 issue of "Bioscience" magazine, was very nearly a scaled-up golden eagle weighing 170 lb. or so, with a wingspan of 25' as compared to Atlanta's 10. In our world, that can't happen.
From:
http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/...s/biganims.html
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Even a cursory examination of scientific literature would have informed the author of this article that the term "brontosaurus" is no longer considered to be a valid name for this creature. In fact, it has not been a proper scientific name since 1903, when it was discovered that Othinel Charles Marsh's "brontosaurus" skeleton was in fact the same species as his apatosaurus. Apatosaurus, having been published first, is now recognized as the proper name, and brontosaurus an improper pseudonym. No paletontologist worth his or her salt would refer to an animal as a "brontosaurus."

As refrences to "bronotsaurus" are peppered throughout this article, I can only conclude that fact-checking was not high on the author's list of priorities. Indeed, as I said, even a cursory examination of literature from the past 30 years would have revealed this glaring error. Also, the paper mentions Ultrasaurus, but makes no mention of Argentinosaurus, Seismosaurus, or other titanosaurs, all of which are more supportive of the claims and have been known and widely discussed for at least the past decade. I do not believe the conclusions of this paper can be verified without a thourough check of the refrences used, as it has demonstrated very sloppy scholarship. Furthermore, I find no bibliography, and have no intention of pouring through the entire article to weed out what sparse refrences have been made in order that they may be authenticated.

The article is interesting, but adds nothing of any substance to the debate, as the material is too questionable to be relied upon. The indications are that much of its source material is, at the very least, several decades out of date, and may be grossly innacurate.

-Pilgrim