Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site imsvax.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!umcp-cs!cvl!elsie!imsvax!ted From: ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) Newsgroups: net.origins Subject: more on large animals and gravity Message-ID: <382@imsvax.UUCP> Date: Mon, 26-Aug-85 09:01:13 EDT Article-I.D.: imsvax.382 Posted: Mon Aug 26 09:01:13 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 29-Aug-85 08:15:01 EDT Organization: IMS Inc, Rockville MD Lines: 303 Amongst the reasons I could think of for believing in the Velikovskian notion of catastrophism, there are a host of minor reasons, and what I would consider to be two major reasons. The minor reasons are convincing. They include: 1. Velikovsky's explaination of the 360 day calendars of virtually all antique nations, an enigma which most history books choose to ignore. 2. Velikovsky's explaination of the origin of petroleum formations. 3. The theory of catastrophic evolution, the only version of evolution which makes sense. 4. Velikovsky's correct prediction in 1950 of the surface heat of Venus and of it's hydrocarbon atmosphere as natural fallouts of his theory of the origin of Venus. The "super-greenhouse" theory which is currently in use to explain Venus' heat is the single worst example of an after-the-fact ad-hoc theory which I am aware of. The theory's creation was an example of what I would call dishonorable behavior on the part of astronomists. The theory exists for no other reason than to prevent Immanuel Velikovsky from claiming credit which is rightly his. My own distrust of the natural sciences and their journals, particularly astronomy, stems from such reasons. 5. The very elegant explanations for so much of what we read in ancient literature which Velikovsky's theories provide. The two things which I regard as major reasons for believing in catastrophism include the enigma of the large animals, which I and several other writers have been beating to death on the net for the last 4 weeks, and one other. I wish to get into this second major reason reason for catastrophism beginning next week, and will therefore make this my last article for a while on the topic of large animals. I claim that the existence of creatures whose size and weight would prevent them from functioning in our world is compelling evidence that the FELT EFFECT of the force of gravity was considerably less in ancient times than it is now. This works in favor of catastrophists such as Velikovsky, David Talbott, Leroy Ellenberger et al who have a plausible explaination for all of this. Traditional science has no such explanation. The laws governing gravity have never changed to my knowledge. But the FELT EFFECT of gravity changes for any number of reasons, including the fact that you might be swimming, or standing right under the moon etc. The explanations for lesser gravity in the ancient world are of this sort. Copies of David Talbott's "The Saturn Myth" Doubleday 1980 are still around and give a good account of some of this. Scientists studying dinosaurs around the turn of the century concluded that the big sauropods lived in water. Calculations they did showed that their legs would not support them on land and that water bouyancy would have been their only possible hope. Two observations: 1. Those who made these calculations were not relying on any immature or incomplete body of knowledge as regards engineering or math. The Brooklyn bridge had already been built by then and the first really large steel warships were being built. 2. The calculations were based on the Brontosaur and his near cousins, the largest sauropods known THEN. These calculations hold DOUBLE for more recent finds such as the ULTRASAUR, which could nearly swallow a brontosaur, and TRIPLE for the BREVIPAROPUS, which could swallow BOTH of them. Books describe the ultrasuar as 100 feet long and likely as heavy as a blue whale. Breviparopus was 160 feet long, likely far heavier than a blue whale. One such creature would make the entire defensive unit of a football team; since he could cover the field from sideline to sideline with ten feet to spare, the opponents would never score. But there was a problem with these calculations. They ignore the fact that sauropods show no adaptation for life in water. They would need huge flat feet to keep from sinking hopelessly in the mud on river bottoms; They didn't have them. But scientists tended to ignore these facts and books on dinosaurs described sauropods as living in rivers. The only way out of the enigma, the only logical way to have sauropods live on land and yet not be crushed by their own weight, is to believe that the effect of gravity was less in what I term the archaic world, the world prior to the flood. This is what you would expect, having understood what Velikovsky and Talbott have to say about the Saturnian age. It solves the problem of the sauropods rather elegantly, as well as the problem of the pterosaurs and pteratorns etc. These giant birds obviously could not fly in our world, yet they were obviously made for flying. It is impossible to picture them having earned their living by any means that did NOT involve flight. Stanley Friesen, in a recent article on net.origins, denies the entire proposition. He writes: >> Every book on >> dinosaurs I have read mentions the problem of >> weight for these animals; most state that >> brontosaurs lived in water even though their bodies >> show no adaptation for an aquatic life, simply >> because rudimentary calculations showed that their >> legs would not support them on land. >Well, you have not been reading very recent work on this. >Those "calculations" were *very* rudimentary, so rudimentary I would >call them guesses rather than calculations. *Real* calcualtions >have shown that even the largest "brontosaur" had plenty of *extra* >support capacity in thier legs! They would have had no more trouble on >dry land than an Elephant. This has been accepted for quite a number >of years now by the scientific community. In fact the lack of aquatic >adaptions in these animals is now held to be conclusive proof that >they were *not* aquatic. >> The problem >> for large birds is more appalling. I have actually >> seen books which state that pterosaurs and >> pteratorns climbed up mountains and then glided >> down again, a hell of a hard way to have to make a >> living. The authors were admitting that 200 lb >> birds can't fly in our world. >Same problem again, these guesses(or assumptions) >have been amply dispelled by valid calculations. The larger >Pterosaurs have in fact been shown to have a better lift ratio >than any airplane. The stall speed of Pteranodon was about 5 mph >(and that is *air speed* not ground speed). Such an organism >could take off just by facing into the wind!(I believe this was >in a recent issue of one of the Linnean Society jornals). >The pteratorn is prabably a similar case of jumping to a conclusion >before making proper calculations! I see no reason why it could not >fly! >And I wasn't going to get involve in the Velikovsky debate! >I just couldn't let such gross mis-statements pass without comment. RIGHT. I admire a man with a sense of humor. This was enough to send me back to the Rockville library where, amongst other things, I learned about the breviparopus. I went back to the library and spent several hours looking at the more recent dinosaur books. Basically, the newer books indicate that scientists have decided that sauropods lived on land, based upon the aforesaid lack of aquatic structures as well as evidence from newer sauropod tracks. There was no mention of anyone doing calculations showing that sauropods could move on land. Like I said, the basic principles of engineering have not changed since the late 1800s. What this amounts to is not really good science so much as a case of scientists changing their minds as to what constitutes the lesser of two evils. Apparently, they would now rather believe that sauropods lived on land and ignore the problem of weight, rather than assume they lived in water and ignore the problem of structure. The notion of lesser gravity has not yet occurred to them. The Avon Field Guide to Dinosaurs, 1983, says: "Experts used to think that these dinosaur giants had almost always wallowed in the water. Scientists argued that their legs could not have borne their massive weight unless water boueyed up their ponderous bodies. They thought only water plants would have been soft enough for sauropods' cropping teeth to tackle. They believed, too, that the sauropods on land would have been at the mercy of the large fanged carnosaurs. All these notions now stand challenged. Studies show that sauropods were better built for walking on dry land than feeding in deep water......" Edwin Colbert's "Dinosaurs, an Illustrated History", Hammond, 1983, states: "In fact, some of the earlier authorities thought that the giant sauropods were too large to support their great weight on the land, that they of necessity had to stay in water deep enough to float the body. The sauropod trackways from Texas, especially a dramatic sequence found at Glen Rose, point up the fallacy of this argument." No mention of any precise math formulations in either these two or any of the other books I found. The enigma is still there. Both describe the many problems of weight for dinosaurs. The Avon Field Guide states that: "The largest carnosaurs may have managed nore more than a rapid rolling walk, using powerful muscles to keep the tail held stiffly off the ground, so balancing the mighty torso, short, thick neck, and big, deep head..... As time passed, larger kinds of carnosaurs replaced the early types. The smaller, more active ones could have attacked plant eaters at least as big as camptosaurids. The largest were probably too slow and clumsy to kill, and fed on corpses - behaving more like jackels than like lions. So the best modern science can do for the mighty tyrannosaur is to make a jackel out of him. It's almost too funny to deal with. I have news for Stanley Friesen, the editors at Avon, and anyone else interested in dinosaurs. Nothing makes it in this world by wallowing, shuffling, floundering, hobbling, gliding without being able to flap your wings and FLY when needed, or flying at 5 mph. The tyrannosaur himself would have been an easy target for smaller carnosaurs or wolves if his best was as Avon described. Likewise, the pteratorn had to catch prey to live. Try catching a deer or rabbit sometime with your governor set at 5 miles per hour. Likewise, the picture science gives us of the pterasaurs is basically ludicrous. You get this picture of a giant flying reptile, making it's home in cliffs, using its 5 mph stall speed to spread its wings into the wind and take off and soar. The problem with all this? It's wouldn't be able to capture airborne prey at 5mph; it would have to have been a prehistoric vulture. But you don't find many dead animals in the cliffs. It would have had to descend to the valleys and lowlands to find dead animals, land, eat them (and presumably gain several pounds in the process), and then what? Especially on a windless day (I still need to eat on windless days, and I am assuming the pterosaurs did). Remember, albatrosses today can barely take off at thirty pounds. The pterosaur's only hope in life was Immanuel Velikovsky and David Talbott's theory regarding lesser gravity. Pterosaurs probably wore Velikovsky tee-shirts. Likewise, gravity being what it is today, nothing evolves into a state in which it can only waddle, shuffle, hobble, flounder, or glide with no possibility of powered flight when needed. Simple Darwinian principles prevent that. Anything tending in that direction perishes long before it could think in terms of new species. Hence, the largest animals we have are our present elephants. If the force of gravity were to be cut in half tommorrow, it would likely be less than a hundred years before we had mammoth and megalotherium sized animals again. Normal evolution as it proceeds now can account for fairly large differences in size WITHIN a species in a few generations. Finally, we come to the problem of the extinction of all such large animals, with the lonely exceptions of the elephant, rhino, and giraffe. Catastrophists make the totally logical claim that large animals were particularly vulnerable to extermination during catastrophies, having the most difficult time getting to high ground or cover, and that left-over large dinosaurs and mega-mammals died when the effect of gravity changed after the flood, making the world no longer habitable for them. Louis Ginzberg's "Legends of the Jews", citing sources of rabbinical literature which go back two thousand years before Christ, actually describes the last days of several of these leftover large dinosaurs. The notion that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago is one of the fairy tales of modern science. Consider that no instance is known of an entire species being exterminated from a major continent in recorded history other than at the hand of man, and that only recently, within the last several hundred years. Ancient man had neither the capability nor the inclination for such feats. Most of the cases of species extermination which science books like to go over occured on islands. The notion that humans exterminated most of the world's mega-fauna is idiotic and worthy of ridicule. An imperial elephant stood four or five feet taller at the shoulders than modern African elephants. The same would-be stampede artist which an African elephant would stomp pancake flat, the imperial elephant would stomp microscopically fine. Capturing a single rhinosceros with trucks and heavy equipment is dangerous work and often ends up with overturned trucks and broken bones. Picture ancient man exterminating EVERY SINGLE ONE of the double-sized super-rhinos or megalotheriums on this planet with knives and spears. That is what Bill Jefferys, Stan Friesen et al would have us believe happened. Also every single one of the super-bisons, giant cave bears, mammoths, mastodons, imperial elephants, and on and on. All with knives and spears. Forget stampeding these creatures over cliffs; most of them lived in areas WITHOUT cliffs. Those who would have us believe that man exterminated all these creatures must account for their extinction in areas like our great plains and the great Russian and Siberian steppes where you can travel for DEGREES OF LATTITUDE AND LONGITUDE, and never see a cliff. The notion of humans actually doing all of this is an example of what Hitler would have called the BIG LIE. Hitler was a desperate man; any scientific theory which ends up having to rely on such a notion is, likewise, desperate. But you readers will have to judge between my rationale for extinction and that of Jefferys, Friesen et al based on what has already transpired on the net. Like I say, to me the point seems obvious and not really worthy of any further debate and I've got a new topic for next week.