- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: One-off Publishing (10 Aug 1994)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0952260301
- ISBN-13: 978-0952260301
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,123,742 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Synopsis
The dinosaurs have been a source of wonder and fascination since they were first discovered. A large part of this fascination is their gigantic size, for they were the largest land animals to ever live, with even the smaller dinosaurs dwarfing the largest land animals of today. Although the gigantic size of the dinosaurs is obvious, the reason has remained a mystery for over a century. Why were the dinosaurs so huge?
The dinosaurs have been a source of wonder and fascination since they were first discovered. A large part of this fascination is their gigantic size, for they were the largest land animals to ever live, with even the smaller dinosaurs dwarfing the largest land animals of today. Although the gigantic size of the dinosaurs is obvious, the reason has remained a mystery for over a century. Why were the dinosaurs so huge?
In October 1987, whilst on a lazy holiday, I pondered on this question of the dinosaurs' gigantic size compared with present-day life. As a design engineer, I was particularly interested in calculations which showed that the bones of the larger dinosaurs were too weak to support their own body weight. Here was the essential paradox of the dinosaurs' large size. Their bones should buckle and crack. Yet the fossil bones in museums around the world showed that these giants had thrived in their own world of hundreds of millions of years ago. How can both of these statements be true?
There is one simple, yet astonishing, answer. The size of all life is controlled by gravity. A stronger gravity would tend to reduce the size of life whilst a weaker gravity would allow life to become larger. Dinosaurs may have become so huge because the earth's surface gravity was weaker than present.
The explanation is beautifully simple in its clarification of the dinosaurs' gigantic size. Using the concept of an increasing gravity allows a fascinating new world in which the gigantic animals of the past were forced to develop smaller sizes as gravity increased to the present day value. There can be no doubt that this size reduction of life has taken place. After the dinosaurs became extinct, a range of supergiant mammals reached the size of the smaller dinosaurs. Millions of years after them came giant versions of the animals of today. These died out within the last few million years to leave their smaller present day cousins.
Could gravity have been less in the past? My book is an attempt to explore the possibility.
Since the book's first publication I've been astonished at the number of people who have written to inform me that they had reached exactly the same conclusion. A reduced gravity during the Dinosaurs time would have allowed them to reach gigantic sizes. But they had not been able to explain how gravity has increased and so many of them abandoned the idea. Certainly the most difficult part to explain is not why gravity must have increased but how this increase has occurred.
In the book I offer a number of possibilities but I investigate one explanation in great detail. This is a concept that has been augured about for over 50 years - The Expanding Earth theory. I devote a whole chapter to the history of the evidence supporting the Expanding Earth theory. In other parts of the book I examine how an increase in size and mass of the Earth would result in an increase in the Earth's gravity. I explain how this gravitational increase can be calculated from the geological evidence for the Expanding Earth. The gravitational increase provided by these calculations is the same as that required to explain the gigantic size of the Dinosaurs! Is this just coincidence? I'll let you decide.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Important trailblazing work,
By A Customer
This review is from: Dinosaurs and the Expanding Earth: One Explanation for the Gigantic Sizes of Some Pre-historic Life (Hardcover)
This book touches upon what is today considered forbidden scientific territory, and no-doubt many will call the author a crazy crank. But let us not forget history here. A man called Wegener was made a laughing stock in his time, and his name became a pseudonym for "utter fool," all because he advanced the ( then ) absolutely absurd concept of continental drift. Ironically, this absurd theory that everyone knew for a fact was pseudo-scientific non-sense of the worst kind, is today one of the cornerstones of the modern scientific establishment. My point is the utter fools and total idiots of one generation, are ( sometimes ) the scientific geniuses and pioneers of the next generation. I could give many more examples - indeed scientific textbooks are replete with them, but you get the point. It must be stated megafauna is a huge problem which no-one, and I mean no-one, in the mainstream wants to talk about. Which, to be honest, I see as somewhat scandalous. These guys are paid to research the truth as it were - its their full time job. Let me explain the problem by reference to birds. Firstly you need to know how a wing works and what makes planes fly. Do not worry, this is not at all difficult. The top part of a wing is curved, and the bottom part is flat. This means that when air arrives at the front edge of the wing, the air going over the top has to go further to get to the rear edge of the wing. Because the air has to go further in the same time - it must move faster. Because it is moving faster it is more spread out and less dense. Therefore air pressure above the wing is lower than below the wing. The wing is therefore 'pulled,' up, into this area of low pressure. Simple. Right. Now the lifting ability of a wing depends upon surface area and increases with the square. This is only two numbers are involved, width and length. However, the mass or weight of a bird depends upon three factors, width, length, and depth. So mass increases with the cube. Hence at some point as birds grow larger, because mass increases faster than surface area, beyond a certain weight flight becomes impossible for birds. In the modern word, this is around 30 pounds. If that number does not mean much to you, think of a Swan or other such large bird. I've seen Swans in parks, beyond all question they can barely get off the water. Now, the problem is in the fossil record we have not 50 pound birds, but 200 pound birds. We can see there is simply no way these massive 200 pound birds could ever get off their bellies in the modern world. And if you are wondering how passenger jets get off the ground given what I have just said - the answer is they use a vastly more powerful power unit called a jet engine, which drives the air over the wings much faster than any flapping motion ever could, vastly increasing the lift potential of the wings. Look, I do not know if the earth has been expanding or not - but that is not the point here. The point is that there is a decent scientific case to be made for the theory, and it therefore merits discussion. If people were willing to talk about these issues more, we *MIGHT* actually get some answers. I am confident someday we will get definitive answers, one way or the other, but in the meantime, I guess this wonderful text is the best we have. I hope it brings forth the second generation of researchers this subject area so desperately needs.
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