Slashdot Mirror
World's Biggest Dinosaur Constructed
Corey Sweeney writes: "The world's largest dinosaur skeleton, a seismosaur, was constructed in Bynum, Mont. this week. It's over 135 feet long and 22 feet high, and some have estimated that the seismosaurous could have weighed up to 150 tons. Disputes over how the seismosaur could have supported its own ponderous weight is the source of "interesting" theories of dinosaur evolution. "
Actually, they do, in a way. Thanks to preserved footprints, we can calculate the speed at which animals were moving.
At one time, the world was flat,
Are you sure? I know that the size of the earth was calculated in 200bc, and they came within the margin of error of their insterments. That is within a few miles. It is a popular myth that everyone thought the world was flat, and perhaps most people did in the 1400s. the king of Portigal wasn't fooled by Columbus, since the kind knew the size of the world to be about 4 times was Columbus claimed. the king of spain knew the same thing, but his wife got involved and being a good husband (Was he good otherwise? For all I knew the preacher had given a sermen on not beating your wife the day before and he was feeling a little repentant) he sent some ships that were ready to be retired and some prisoners with this columbus fellow to make his wife happy and get all out of the way. Now a days the rish do similear things for a tax write off.
It's known that this exact bones->legends progression happened with the mammoths. It's also known that the Cyclops legend was inspired by elephant skulls found in caves (possibly Hannibal's elephants!) wherein the nasal opening looks like a large single eye socket. So it's possible that monster legends could descend from ancient bones.
Of course, for our dragon legend to be started from dinosaur bones, I'm guessing it would have had to be a mostly articulated skeleton, and in order to accommodate the "wings" our mythical dragons seem to always have, maybe it was a plesiosaur or mosasaur or other aquatic beastie whose huge front flippers looked to an ancient like wings. If the skeleton were not articulated, they'd find the giant bones and think of giant people, as seemed to happen all too often, and if it were articulated but of something like a t-rex, the shape of our modern dragon would be very different.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
You're probably just trolling, but what the hey.
If anyone is mounting attacks on God, it's you, my friend. Creationism went out of fashion in the late 1800s as CHRISTIANS, seeking to understand how God works, went out and did some digging and pretty much unilaterally decided Genesis was a parable and that life DID evolve in a gradual process over a very long time. And indeed, which is the greater glory: an unbelievably complex world billions of years old, where entire PHYLA have come and gone, all spawned from a single explosion where God infused the rules of the universe into a point of matter and let it do its thing, or just some built-all-at-once artifice a mere 6000 years old with one ten-thousandth the biological diversity? God's supposed to be this great builder, and you've just insulted His greatest masterpiece by claiming it only took him six days and it was built "last week" on the cosmic clock.
Anyway. There's a tunnel through a hillside near here, in central Indiana, where fossils (not dinosaurs, just invertebrates - brachiopods, molluscs, crinoids) are literally falling out of the walls. These are not plaster, nor are they carved stone - they are made of a different, harder mineral composition than the surrounding rock, they go all the way back into the rock (the whole hill is full of fossils, as are the nearby hills) and there is definitely NO way that a human forger could insert fakes into that hillside for you or me to find. This is just a site I know of PERSONALLY, where I have held fossils of oceangoing creatures from 230 million years ago, many of which simply don't exist today, and where I can personally see that we have certain species at the bottom of the tunnel and different species at the top. (And they're not hydrodynamically sorted either, there is no size trend.)
Creationism came back into fashion, not because of any scientific discovery or lack thereof, but because people like you needed some new tactic to "prove" to yourself and to the world that the Bible is right and science is wrong. You're saying so in your own words: you connect evolution with liberals, socialists, non-Christians, and any other unsavory things you can think of. You have NO evidence to support your claim that dinosaur fossils are frauds - in fact I think there's at least 100 Slashdotters who will volunteer to DRIVE you to sites where vertebrate fossils are literally falling out of the walls, and show you up close that they are not fakes. But the basis for your conclusion isn't scientific fact - the basis for your conclusion is that people who believe in evolution are People You Don't Like.
can't have 65 million year-old fossils on a 6,000 year-old Earth!
That's what we've been saying all along. But, um, geologists began to notice the earth was way older than 6000 years BEFORE Darwin and his naughty little book, so I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. Other than the fact that you want the world to just straighten up and meet your ideal, and you don't care what facts you have to ignore or distort to get there, huh? You have the audacity to claim evolution is nonsense and that dinosaur bones are frauds, yet your 'divine' authority is a book written down by HUMANS and your 'science' is nothing but a parroting of the standard ultraconservative party line - you can't even make up your OWN mind about who you hate, you have to let Rush Limbaugh tell you!
I also note that some of your Creationist brethren DO accept that dinosaurs existed, and have come up with some bizarre theories involving the Flood in order to explain them away. Which makes you a Creationist among Creationists, an extremist among extremists.
Were you hoping to change some minds here today, or are you just trying to make brownie points with God the same way people make up job contacts for their weekly unemployment vouchers? Scene from your trial: "But I DID try to convince people! See, I even went on Slashdot and tried to show them everything they know is wrong and I even went out of my way to insult their intelligence just like I'm supposed to. You can't blame me that they didn't drop their heathen ways and follow you instantly, oh Lord..."
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
No, it's located in Armonk.
Hmm... I've been at work too long :-)
More likely is the possibility that ancient humans also found dinosaur bones. Think about this: Your primitive band of 10,000 BC humans is looking for a new cave when the group stumbles across a semi-complete T.Rex skeleton exposed in a streambed by last winters rains. Everybody recognizes it as a skeleton of a huge fearsome beast, but your primitive tribe has know way of knowing that it's millions of years old. You all move on, but for the rest of your lives tell the story of the great dragonmonster skeleton you found beside the stream. Your children tell their children, and after a few generations it becomes the story of the time their great ancestors victoriously defeated the evil dragon which was trying to keep them from reaching their new home.
:)
That's how legends start, after all
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Blah. I first heard about this as a little kid watching the excellent animated movie, "Flight of the Dragons." I have no idea if it precedes Anne McCaffrey's book.
The movie laid it out this way: Dragons raid diamond mines that are in limestone rock. They swallow the diamonds, which stick in their craw, and then eat the limestone. The diamonds help break up the limestone. Then when it gets to the stomach, it produces the H2 gas.
-Matt
-Cheetah
A poster writes "The worlds largest fossil nest", believed to be that of a microsoftosaur, was discovered by archeologists near a place which used to be called Redmond. Its 3000 feet across and about 40 ft high, and some have estimated the nest could have contained tens of thousands of employees. Disputes over how the monster could have supported its own ponderous weight is the source of "interesting" theories of dinosaur evolution."
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
My great uncle worked on the Manhattan project and I asked him about the "igniting the Earth's atmosphere" thing. He told me that it was actually a joke where the older scientists (who were about 30) would stand near the younger guys and talk about how they thought the chain reaction might spread to the atmosphere and blow up the planet. Later on, the younger scientists told reporters about it, not realizing they were being screwed with.
-B
The site referenced by this article is quite suspect and oozes poor scientific method and reasoning. (The skeletal calculations are a joke.) That is not true of all Creationist/anti-evolutionist sites however. (The question of how such big animals were viable is an interesting one, but the analysis offered is quite weak, and inexplicably ignores the possibility that these and other fossils may have become "enlarged" by some unknown process. This hypothesis should be investigated if such size truly presents problems, as it may offer a more likely explanation for 170 lb. eagles than variable planetary gravity . Still, it seems difficult to envision a process that would enlarge so uniformly at such magnitudes...)
It is quite possible to reject evolution solely on the bases of scientific fact and the way the scientific community plays fast and loose with actual facts in order to make them support the dogma of evolutionary development of man. A pretty good reference site is noted hacker Do-While Jones' site, Science Against Evolution. Don't even bother to write a flaming reply until you've browsed his pages to see the extent of the scientific dishonesty plaguing this topic - I think you'll find he does an admirable job of sticking to factual, scientific evidence and arguments.
Let's face facts folks, there's plenty of absolutely deplorable science on both sides, in both cases often driven by a dogmatic attempt to make the facts fit the theory. The only thing that can be argued with certainty from a scientific point of view is that we don't know how we got here, and we can't with any significant degree of certainty even date the things we find. Any statement beyond this is speculation, not science.
A good example of this scientific dishonesty would be the "composite foot" literally dreamed up for "Lucy" (afarensis, a fossil for which the feet are conspicuously absent!) to fit the Laetoli footprints in Tanzania. Although there is absolutely no evidence that afarensis made those footprints, Donald Johansen wanted to prove a connection so badly that he invented a foot for Lucy that would fit the footprints. This "composite foot" was "made from fossil bones belonging to Homo from nearby Olduvai Gorge combined with Hadar toe bones" - in other words, he used 3.5 myo toe bones from one species and foot bones from a (supposedly) entirely different species that lived a million years later, mixed thoroughly with imagination and preconceived notions! And so now evolutionists go around telling people "science" has proven afarensis made those tracks. Oh, yeah, that's good science! All this to explain a footprint that is by thier own admission indistinguishable from a modern human footprint, a foot print that in reality could be much younger than they assume.
Seriously, I find it takes far less faith to believe in Creation than in evolution!
Warning: Personal beliefs rant follows... As an added benefit, accepting that Creation could be true in turn led me to consider that perhaps the Bible was inerrant after all, as was believed by many people much brighter than I over centuries. As soon as you're willing to assume that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant word of God (for which there is quite compelling scientific evidence by the way), you begin to see that that single presupposition leads to a perfectly logically consistent belief system which explains all the hard questions. Personally, I believe John Calvin tied all this together better than anyone since St. Paul, and Jonathan Edwards better than anyone since Calvin. (Edwards, although unfamiliar to many today, is generally acknowledged by historians as the most brilliant mind in the history of the New World: he entered the precursor to Yale at age thirteen with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew already under his belt. You can read a bit more about him at my friend Mark Trigsted's JonathanEdwards.com site.) Don't flame either Calvin or Edwards until you've read them and really tried to understand their arguments. I think you'll be blown away - in this sense Calvinism is perfect for Geeks, since it provides the only structured and sytematic Theology cabable of explaining all the things that really need explaining. This isn't warm, fuzzy, Christianity, but it passes the test of Truth, which is far more important than a feel-good factor. Some of us are proud to be Puritans.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
You're thinking of Anne McCaffrey's Pern series. Yes it let the dragons breath fire, but it wasn't necessary for flight, much less teleportation and other neat things they did -- witness the dragonettes (forerunners of the dragons) who could fly just fine without the stone.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
More likely, the belt consists of stuff that was never able to condense into a planet because of tidal forces pulling on it. But that's just my opinion.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Skimming the 'interesting theories' article, it stuck me as being like the recent discovery of how bees actually are able to fly. Previously, the aerodynamic laws and theories were not able to explain how bees flew, and in fact they predicted that bees should not be able to fly.
Basically, what we have is the fact that these creatures did actually exist, and presumably thrived. It simply remains to adjust our assumptions about their physical characteristics to account for this fact.
On a slightly different topic, I saw a program which suggested that T.rex did not actually move very fast, since if they tripped, even at moderate speeds, they would mash their skulls.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
The author does a good job of summarising a whole lot of questions we don't know about the dinosaurs. Although he concentrates on the sauropods, I thought the most interesting stuff in the article was about the pteranodons and so on - particularly about the wing span and everything. I wish he hadn't mentioned that bollocks about gravity increasing, because then there would have been an interesting debate about how the animals existed rather than one long flame towards him (as if most people on /. wouldn't have realised that the gravity theory is wrong anyway!)
:-)
I did spot one flaw in his theory that no one else has mentioned - he asks things like how pteranodons could have survived if they couldn't take off quickly. Well who says they did? They're extinct, aren't they?
His maths might be a bit suspect, but they looked plausible to me, not that I'm a mathematician or a biologist. Rather than just saying that they don't make sense, why not say why?
Just last week (or two), the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago unveiled the largest and most complete T-Rex skeleton to date. Called Sue, the project took many months and many millions of dollars to complete.
:)
This helped many scientists gain added insight into the structure and composition of the T-Rex and other dinosaurs. Fun stuff.
-- BlueCalx | http://nickd.org/
Just looking at one of these suckers upright makes
me laugh at the argument I once heard from
someone, claiming that humans could probably have out-run a tyrannosaur. The reasoning stringently followed the laws of fluid dynamics and science's knowledge of the properties of present-day muscular tissue, completely ignoring the fact that evolution usually comes up with a way to achieve. Hell, I bet a tyrannosaur could have out-run a 4x4. And I'll bet twinkle-toes here could move, too.
Saturn Theory ( which the article references ) suggests that all the planets were in alignment in extreme proximity and in a geo-stationary northern position. I assume from this ( though they do not state it anywhere that I've read ) that gravity would be tremendously affected though in a peculiar way. The northern hemisphere would feel lighter while the southern would feel heavier. Again I haven't read this anywhere, so I'm just extrapolating.
-Michael
At the beginning of the article they relate things as evidence of the Saturn Theory.. A far fetched if not radical theory about a period of time in "human" history where all planets were in close proximity for an extended period of time.
-Michael
Check out the replies to this one.
I'm really interested how you can equate Holden with that last interesting FTL article at the NYT or even quantum mechanics in general? Occam's Razor cuts both ways you know.
Well, it is an interesting theory. Interesting as in "how in hell can anyway really think that would be true!" So this guy thinks that gravity was less than it is now 65 million or so years ago. So, what could make gravity less? It would mean that 65 million years ago the Earth would have had significantly less mass than it does now. However, despite all the claims made in this "theory" there is not one shred of evidence to support the idea that there was any change in the Earth's gravitational field of that magnitude.
Granted, it's amazing how something that large could support itself and its own massive weight, but there is plenty of evidence which supports the theory that large sauropods like Seismosaurus did spend a considerable amount of time in watery environments to help ease the burden. To say that this isn't true because these sauropods don't have adaptations to watery environments isn't correct. Modern hippos provide a similar example. They are very clunky on land, but spend great deals of time in the water and don't display very many obvious adaptations to a watery environment.
Interesting theory... but completely wrong...
All right! It's the world's first modular dinosaur. Built from existing components, no less!
Yeah, but is it an Open Source dinosaur? And if so, when will we be able to download the Dino code from Sourceforge.net?
Although, there might be some patent problems if they used human bones... I mean, won't the companies that have patents on portions of our genomes be pissed if we start building other creatures out of human parts?
Maybe we need a GPL for human DNA?
Does this
Or... Actually, the article says Mr. Kazmaier is doing "squats" which do *not* involve lifting the bar over your head. The bar rests on your shoulder, and you ... squat.
Check your math again. :)
"When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood."
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
actually, in respect to the T-Rex scene (like so many other in that movie, they did it completely wrong. Contrary to popular belief (like anything else that's true), the Tyrannosaurus Rex was not the mighty hunter he is portrayed as. Becuase of his massive size, he kind of just lumbered along, and waddled after weak or dying prey, and finished it off. sorry to burst the proverbial bubble, but the "tyrant lizard king" was i giant vulture, whose tiny little arms did nothing more than help to get its lazt butt up in the mornings
"There is no there, there." ---William Gibson, on Cyberspace
IANAP (I am not a palentologist, but the Earth at the time was figured to be rotating at a faster rate, while some scientists have felt the spin itself wasn't perfectly horizontal but more of a "wobble".
Nonetheless, as far as the larger sauropods and gravity are concerned, a couple theories have stressed that the tail and head movements of the creatures enabled it to survive. Like the physics that enable a bumblebee to remain aloft, the tail portion would've been in motion a great deal of the time, while the neckbones acted as a fulcrum.
Hm..they say "135 feet long and 22 ft high" of which i have no idea what is, then goes on to add "could have weighed up to 150 tons." Didn't they just change measuring system there? Shouldn't they measure it in pounds or something *G
There are both US and metric tons. I assume that they were using US.
For people in countries that use a sane measurement system:
135 ft = 41.1 m
22 ft = 6.7 m
150 US tons = 136000 kg = 136 metric tons
The documentary "Walking with Dinosaurs" has some interesting insights on this problem of weight support. In depth studies were done not only on the fossil records, but on living creatures to determine how they deal with similar problems. The interesting point about elephants is that in order to be able to support their own weight, they walk with three legs on the ground at all times and not with the two leg at a time step we are accustomed to seeing in other 4 legged creatures. This allows for maximum weight support. The scientists that were involved in the making of Walking with Dinosaurs used this theory to help model the motions in their animation.
One other thing to consider in this equation, and I beleive this to be a little known fact...Pound for pound, muscle and bone have higher tensile and compressive strength than steel. Also, legs are fairly impressive levers and capable of moving lots of weight. Its been many years since I did any mechanics calculations, but I think some interesting analysis could be done on proportunate strength when it comes to dionosaur legs.
Anyone interested in the validity of Ted Holden's interesting theories should stroll on down to the talk.origins news group and ask the residents about Ted Holden. Read this guy's webpages for humor, but know that he is so deadly serious and has been so persistent in his cries of catastrophism, conspiracy, and other mental constipation that overly large sections of the talk.origins FAQ deal with his nonsense. I'm sure he'll welcome the slashdot effect though.
XML causes global warming.
Although, there might be some patent problems if they used human bones... I mean, won't the companies that have patents on portions of our genomes be pissed if we start building other creatures out of human parts?
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
The earth's gravity has not changed appreciably since 4.5 billion years ago, when an object about the size of mars collided with proto-earth, flinging up our moon in the process. It's true that the moon is very slowly degrading the spin of the earth. In fact, if the sun didn't burn out first, the earth would eventually settle down to a day that's 47 times as long as it is now, due to tidal forces from the moon. This does not affect the dinosaurs, however, since they were fairly recent, on the geological scale.
It is true that the spin of the earth does lessen gravity a little bit. I don't know the exact scale, but it is enough that some companies and countries are considering equatorial rocket launch platforms, since that added boost saves a lot of money on fuel. Still, this change does not make such a huge difference (as travelling from Ontario to the Bahamas will show) as to allow a quintupling or so in the size of the largest creatures on earth.
I suppose I should clarify one thing. Contrary to what that evolution article claims, the Elephant is not the largest creature on earth. Think whales. How do they support their weight? They live in water. I do not consider it such a ridiculous concept that perhaps dinosaurs of this size lived mostly in water, with those nice long necks well suited for eating food on the shore while still staying deep enough in the channel to be supported in weight. Of course, a creature like this does not need to jump, as elephants do not. It may not have ever even laid down in its adult life.
I agree with the physics in the article, but I think the author jumps to way too many conclusions.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Sure, they *say* they did this.... how do we know they didn't just glue together a bunch of bones from some other dinosaurs (or humans, for that matter)?? Think about it...
~~~~~~~~~~
Martee
Why don't they name it Microsoftosaurus?
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
I really thought the explanation about the impossibility of the existence of the larger dinosaur skeleton was a joke. Was it? One serious assumption made was that the dinosaurs needed to lift things, even themselves. Perhaps the larger saurians NEVER SAT DOWN. If you weighed over 10 tons and had to eat for several hours of the day, wouldn't you avoid sitting? The other statements made involved the impossibilities of the blood pressure necessary to pump blood up 50 feet of neck. The giraffe can do it to 20 and the skeleton in question clearly shows the head about level with the body. The significant pressure comes from a differential between the heart and the head/feet, not the distance from the head to the ground. A plumber could do that math for you. Sure, they probably couldn't hold their heads high for very long, just as a fighter pilot can't handle 12 Gs for very long. The gravitational effect of all the planets combined is a small fraction of the effect of the moon upon the earth. The earth would need a ridiculous rotational speed for gravity to be significantly less apparent.
/. really needs to get its shit together on the science articles... way too many of 'em contain some awfully embarressing nonsense in them. All the faster-than-light, quantum woo-woo nonsense, and now this creationist bullshit makes /. look like a bunch of rubes.
Come on guys, give it up. Seriously. Enough is enough.
.. well, guess what, my lib-lab friends, the game is up. It is only a matter of time before news of your faked dig sites and plaster skeletons spread across the land. And then what will you do?
.. in 65 million years, the fossils that we dig up will probably be those of the liberals! We can display them in museums and make movies about them! "Recently-revived ancestors of humans break free from their exhibits and attempt to redistribute your wealth and enslave your children in the new film Socialist Park!" I can just see the advertisements now. In the meantime, you liberals will have to come up with some new attack on God. This one didn't work. It didn't work by a long shot. I hope that you all will have the good taste to take down all of your "dinosaur" exhibits from museums and admit that they are frauds. It is the only honorable thing to do.
You can only sloppily slap together so many shoddy plaster "skeletons" before people begin to catch on. Sure, you had people going for a while. Hell, with the help of Hollywood leftists (Spielberg, Kennedy, Marshall, etc.) and their Jurassic Park movies, you almost fooled a whole new generation of impressionable minds into believing that all of these "terrible lizards" actually existed! Criminy! You same people are the ones responsible for libberish such as Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man. As a small child, I can remember my friends having little "pop-up books" about dinosaurs. Where did all of the money you made from the books go? Planned Parenthood? Handgun Control, Inc?
Unfortunately for the liberals, the game is up. The public now knows that the whole Theory of Dinosaurs is a fraud, a sham, the worst pseudoscientific trickery that has ever been perpetrated on the citizens of God's green Earth. And it was simple math that did it. Liberals like to keep the public "dumbed down"; apparently they were hoping that nobody would notice that you can't have 65 million year-old fossils on a 6,000 year-old Earth! Heh heh heh
Who knows
nothing any larger than the largest elephants could live in our world today
:)
Keep in mind that before the train conquered the Wild Wild West, some people proclaimed that man would not be able to breathe at the amazing speeds (of 30 MPH) that the train promissed. After all, it was kind of hard to breathe regularly on a galloping horse, so going even faster would be impossible.
The folks involved in the Manhattan Project were fearful that their first test blast might ignite the Earth's atmosphere, killing everyone instantly. These were scientists, mathematicians and physicists - but they had no experience and were forced to speculate.
At one time, the world was flat, and then suddenly became round when Magellan's ship didn't fall of the edge of it in his circumnavigation attempt. The Moon is just fossilized green cheese, and there's still a face on Mars - a sure sign of intelligent life there, but not much here.
Nice try, but it's turtles all the way down, and evolution is still illegal in Kansas.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
This makes so much sense.. I always wondered about that, ever since I saw Jurassic Park, with the T-Rex tearing along at like 100 km/hour chasing the jeep through the woods. Assuming the Rex is, say, oh 70 tons,
M = 70,000 KG
V = 27.7 M/S
Kinetic Energy = 1/2(m)(v^2) = 1/2(70,000)(27.7)^2 = 26,855,150 J of energy
I still wonder if an animal that size COULD, in fact, exerpt that much energy. And even if it could, don't you think it would get tired, maybe start dragging it's stomach on the ground?
.- CitizenC (User Info)
Hydrogen, methane perhaps. Just imagine a giant 'swim bladder' attached to the lower GI to trap gas..Feeling a little heavy on your feet? Hit the jurassic Taco Bell for some 49 cent Gorditas with a double side of Bush's baked beans..
No helium; After all, it was detected first on the surface of the Sun, not on Earth. Not enough of it, per se..
.sig: Now legally binding!
"daddy, there's a dinosaur in our backyard..."
"...and the neighbor's back yard, and our other neighbor's back yard, and..."
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
*ducks back into the trench for cover*
Whoever wrote that page about dinosaurs and gravity obviosuly never saw the Horizon program (BBC Science program, can't remember what it's called in the US, maybe "Nova") on the "Natural History of an Alien".
They made a very interesting point about worlds with stronger gravity than earth. As gravity increases, so does air density and it increases in such a way that in a higher gravity environment the increase in air density is enough to allow even bigger flying creatures despite the stronger gravity.
For flying creatures, lifting force will increase as the square of the force of gravity.
So his point about bigger flying creatures needing weaker gravity is in error.
Bigger flying creatures implies stronger gravity, which kinda messes up his argument.
(If you didn't read the page, he's arguing that the existence of enormous dinosaurs implies that gravity was a weaker force in pre-history)
I tried, I really, really tried. I gave an honest College try, and attempted to work my way through the 'Interesting Theories' link.
What a bunch of BULL.
Remember the 'Religious Right' pages that sprouted all over the net like mushrooms after a rainstorm, as soon as South Park - Bigger, Longer and Uncut came out? That's exactly how the 'IT' article reads.
It's peppered with references to books published by Harvard Press, Oxford Press and whatever else - in an effort to add credibility to something that holds water like a sieve.
It's chock full of numbers that in another context might make sense, but here come out of nowhere to fit into an argument, and disappear again when they become 'inconvenient'. We all know how a liberal sprinkling of math tends to intimidate people into agreeing with the (obviously more intelligent) author. Microsoft does this a whole lot - as do tele-evangelists in their counting of statistical distribution of Deadly Sins in SP:BL&U
The ideas presented in the article are preposterous. They are a lame, ignorant attempt to answer some valid questions - but they are absolute 'sound and fury, signifying nothing'.
Read the article for amusement only. It's the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of FUD, and a great way to get the imagination of junior-high kids fired up. Nothing more.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Interesting link referenced in this story. It links to none other than the web site of a well known creationist kook of talk.origins named Ted Holden.
The theory in his site is that dinosaurs must have experienced a reduced gravity (with respect to the present value) to be able support the massive weight of the larger species.
To support his argument he compares a very strong powerlifter to dinosaurs using the square cubed assumption for scaling (force produced by muscles goes up as a square of body length because it depends on cross section while weight goes up as the cube because it depends on volume).
Of course, the problem with all of this is that this scaling is way too simplistic since we are comparing apples to oranges (Homo sapiens to various sauropods, to be exact). Proof of this is that, contrary to Holden's claims, it doesn't even work for elephants.
From Holden's example, Kazmaier, weighing in at 340 lb., can do a 1000 lb. squat (not the strongest adjusting for body weight, see here, for an example). To see how this scales to a normal weight male (I shall consider myself at 175 lb. the norm for the sake of argument) we take the ratio my weight to Kazmaier's of 175/340 = 0.51. Taking the square cubed assumption it turns into .51^^(2/3) = .64 . meaning a normal 175 lb. person being able to lift .64 * 1340 lb. = 861 lb. to match Kazmaier's performance. As this figure includes body weight it turns into the ability to squat 861 lb.- 175 lb. = 686 lb.
Now, the most I've squatted is 450 lb. (which turns into 450 lb. + 175 lb. = 625 lb.) and I consider myself to have (for a nearly untrained person) near freakish lower body strength. I can assure any and all that I cannot move around comfortably with 450 lb. on my shoulders and can barely take some faltering steps in this situation (and, though I don't know the rules of powerlifting, I'pretty sure that the lift would not have been good enough to count in a competition --not that anyone would be likely to be impressed anyway).
Let's see what the most is that one can weight if the best lifting they can do would match my performance (better to compare myself --freakish lower body strength and all-- rather than a real athlete pushing the limits).
Using Holden's formula (which is correct, though its assumptions are flawed), we get:
The left side turns into 20.0 and the right turns into X^^(1/3). Cubing both sides we get that X = 8000. Thus, 8000 lb. is the most one could weigh to be able to carry one's own weight to match my lifting performance. Note that this doesn't mean walking around all day and even occasionally running quite fast (as elephants are known to do normally in the wild) but rather lifting one's own body weight badly with a maximal effort (and then, perhaps, sinking back exhausted into the couch to watch the Oprah Winfrey show).Adult elephants, on the other hand, can weight a lot more than 8000 lb.. And to those who may point out that my own bipedalism puts me at a disadvantage, I shall point out that circus elephants seem to be able to get on their back feet with great ease (it certainly seems to take a lot less effort than it takes for me to squat a mere 450 lb.)
Thus, taking a more reasonable lift for the scaling exercise and following Holden's assumptions, not only should elephant's fail carrying around their own weight, but they should fail miserably.
But elephants, even very large ones, seem to manage quite well, thank you very much. Thus, my claim that Holden's assumptions do not really hold up under scrutiny is supported