The Impossible Dinosaurs - Megafauna and Attenuated Gravity

Kronia.com ^ | Ted Holden

[samtheman]

Your yahoo ‘voted upon’ solution is wrong. The weight of an object at sea level is the same at the equator as a pole because the seas form an equi-potential surface. The water corrects for variations in gravitational and centrifugal accelerations.

You must have meant to reply to someone else because I don't know anything about any Yahoo voting.

As far as your description of weights at the equator vs. the pole... talk about yahoo... wow, what about on dry land at the equator... what about on Mars, where there is no sea?

This whole thread has the look and feel of a thread on UFO sightings, which thankfully don't show up very much in FR.

[Swordmaker]

Re: your rod

The Square Cube Law does not apply. You are proposing a change in only one dimension, length, when the law applies to proportional increases in all dimensions. So long as you are maintaining the same diameter, doubling a
or tripling the length will only double or triple the volume and mass.

If, however, you double your rod in both length and diameter, then the Square Cube Law DOES apply and the area of the rod would be four times greater and the volume would be eight times greater.

[Shryke]

If, however, you double your rod in both length and diameter

And therein lies your error, I believe. You have assumed that your giant dinosaur has increased in all dimensions by the same amount that its length has increased over a comparative dinosaur, correct?

As a real world example: an earthworm does gain 8 times it's weight growing from 4 to 8 inches - clearly it hasn't doubled in diameter - it has probably only marginally gained in diameter - and thus will be slightly over double the weight. It appears there must be a scale. You, it appears, are using the extreme end of the scale, which would be accurate if two dimensions (I am taking your word for this part) increased at the same rate. But according to the illustrations I have seen, that is obviously not the case. The long, thin parts are longer, but not commensurately thicker.

[Swordmaker]

Re: your rod

The Square Cube Law does not apply. You are proposing a change in only one dimension, length, when the law applies to proportional increases in all dimensions. So long as you are maintaining the same diameter, doubling a
or tripling the length will only double or triple the volume and mass.

If, however, you double your rod in both length and diameter, then the Square Cube Law DOES apply and the area of the rod would be four times greater and the volume would be eight times greater.

[Shryke]

You’ve copied and pasted your last reply to me?

[Poincare]

You must have meant to reply to someone else because I don't know anything about any Yahoo voting.

Go look at the link you provided and quoted in your post #96. Sheesh.

As for the science and logic in this thread, you're out of your depth.

[samtheman]

That’s what all UFO’ers say.

Anybody who disagrees with them is out of their depth.

As for some distant post from long ago, I forgot about this thread completely until you yanked me back in.

I consider this whole subject crackpot. Whacko.

Have fun.

Go sue the government. They’re probably suppressing the truth.

[Swordmaker]

Re: scaling dinosaurs

Perhaps they were skinnier. But the bones were not. Modern animals with thicker bones have more muscle and skin on those bones than their smaller relatives. I see no reason to think that dinosaurs were different. for the tails being skinnier, at proportionate distances from the main body of the animal the tails and necks are proportionately larger. When you hand a neck vertebrae that would be in the same position on a smaller dinosaur but is twice as tall, thick, and wide then the odds are that the neck in that location is also twice as tall, thick and wide.

[Shryke]

Ok, I see where you are going. I will say we must differ at this point. You are suggesting a thickness that doesn’t resemble what I (or you) have seen in nature.

[Swordmaker]

Make that “have a neck vertebrea”

[Swordmaker]

You’ve copied and pasted your last reply to me?

I don't know where the second one came from. Occasionally, I have seen duplicates but those are usually with posting a Ping to the Mac Ping list. This may be an artifact of using an iPhone to post the comment. I posted the reply and then shut off the iPhone... a quarter hour or so later, I opened the browser again and saw it was still posting... strange.

[Swordmaker]

Ok, I see where you are going. I will say we must differ at this point. You are suggesting a thickness that doesn’t resemble what I (or you) have seen in nature.

Are you suggesting that dinosaurs were not part of nature? We see exactly this in nature. Not more than an hour ago I was looking at a vertebra from a Blue Whale in my Chiropractor's office. It was huge... but my Chiropractor took a model human vertebra from the similar part of the spine and showed me that they were virtually identical in shape... just differing in size.

Some people have no idea how really big these titanosaurs really were.

Mounted Argentinasaurus fossil skeleton - 114 feet long

Notice the man under its tail... now imagine muscles, tendons, and skin on that framework... and a gut and internal organs hanging down from those ribs. Also image the size of the diaphragm needed to pump the lungs. How about the muscles needed to keep that neck and tail off the ground... cantilevered out over 40 feet in each direction. Where are the attachment points on the spine for large stay muscles above the neck and tail?

The following picture is a posterior (one of the vertebra from in front of the pelvis) vertebra from a South American Titanosaur the Argentinosaurus huinculensis, next to a human for scale. The estimated weight for this sauropod was between 180-200,000 lbs.

Argentinasaurus vertebra

From the looks of the girl, I'd say she was 5'2", so the vertebra is probably a little over 4 feet tall.

Here is another set of mounted Argentinasaurus fossls... with the bones found in this instance placed in the appropriate locations.

Argentinasaurus

The posterior vertebra of the Amphicoelias fragillimus was reliably described as being 8 feet tall. Twice as tall as the vertebra pictured above.

Every other diplodocoid fossils that have been found, including ones that are complete, have posterior vertebra sizes that are proportionate to their length and proportionate to other sizes of their other bones. For example a 2 foot tall vertebra for a 40 foot long Diplodocus fossil is matched proportionately by a 3 foot tall vertebra in a 60 foot Diplodocus and all the other bones are similarly scaled up compared to the smaller animal. Paleontologists have found the same scaling between other species of sauropods. There is no reason to believe that this would be different for other sauropod dinosaurs. That would make a conservative (this is a conservative web site, you know) multiplier factor for scaling of this very similar build diplodocoid dinosaur about 1.8.

Found with the 8 foot Amphicoelias fragillimus vertebra was a 15 foot femur. Note that the Argentinasaurus' femur in the picture above is about 7-8 feet tall. imagine that fossil in the picture above TWICE as tall. This 15 foot to 8 foot Femur ratio confirms around a 2 times multiplier factor for the size of the Amphicoelias over the Argentinasaurus. Let's stick with the conservative 1.8 factor.

Assuming that the A. fragillimus was not really, really skinny, (which the width of the vertebra would seem exclude) and is actually very similar in build and body shape to all the other sauropods, the Square Cube Law should at least give us a ball-park estimate for its weight. 1.8³ is 5.832. That is the multiplier factor to use to determine the volume and the mass of the larger dinosaur. If Argentinosaurus really weighs 180,000 pounds, then A. Fragillimus would weigh an absurd 1,049,760 pounds (!) That's some ball-park.

If we were to arbitrarily decide that the larger beasty were only 1/2 as wide in proportion to the Argentinosaurus (unlikely as the ribs would be the defining dimension and they connect to that 8 foot vertebra) we could perhaps knock off a good portion of that weight... maybe get it down to under 500,000 pounds... but I doubt it.

[gondramB]

>>So i am insane, a kook, a conspiracy theorist, and now an idiot. How far do you intend to extend you ad hominem attacks?<<

I generally don’t psychoanalyze people over the net
But hear goes. You don’t sound like a consoiracy theorist to me.

You sound like someone who has committed to religion based and almost literalist outlook. Since you seem bright and well spoken, odds are pretty good that you realize your view isn’t supportable evidence as judged by those who spend their studying this stuff.

Now, I don’t blame you if you feel a bit defensive when you are beset on all sides - I certainly get defensive .

None of that makes you a bad person. If my Grand Daddy (an old timey Baptist preacher) were here, I believe he would say “Your God is too small.” That can happen to the best of us when we make assumptions that something beyond what Jesus is somehow essential to faith - when really , God is above that.

[mo]

IMHO, the antedeluvian world was of smaller diameter.....there are “giant” human remains that may suggest this as well.

[Swordmaker]

You don’t sound like a consoiracy theorist to me. You sound like someone who has committed to religion based and almost literalist outlook.

You could not be more wrong. Religion has nothing to do with my involvement except as another data source. Have you seen me bring up ANY religious issue on this thread?

I am following the implications of where the science leads regardless of orthodoxy of paleontology.

The problem is that the issues that rise from the implications of animals of such massive sizes and weights cross many disciplines including cosmology, engineering, mathematics, biomechanics, cellular biology, geometry, aerodynamics, astrophysics, comparative mythology, and religion.

Scientists are usually too specialized in their particular fields to even recognize how the conclusions in another field could impact their field. The sheer volume of written material in every field makes it difficult for scientists to keep current in their own field that reading about another is out of the question. An aeronautical engineer is not likely to read about Teratorns and say "Wait a minute... that doesn't work!" But perhaps they wouldn't even notice because aeronautical engineers are not familiar with the limitations of chemical muscle engines. That might require the specialized knowledge of a scientist working with biomechanics. The members of the other fields, if they even hear about the findings in paleontology at all, are likely to merely dismiss them out of hand or ignore them as not relevant. In fact there is a tendency in what is termed the "hard sciences" to discount disciplines such as paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology as "soft sciences." Some discount them completely as not sciences at all but merely categorizing, observational, comparative, scholarship disciplines that merely dig up things, list what they found, and make up things about what they found.

We see some of that on this thread where posters tend to ignore peer-reviewed paleontological science about the weights and masses and say that the facts must be wrong and that those who publish them must have made a basic error. JS1138 keeps insisting that it is I who has come up with these figures, not the experts in the field, demanding that I prove their work. Peer-reviewed articles are not acceptable to him. They do not want to look at the implications of those facts because the facts may disturb things they believe. That sounds more like the dogma of religion to me.

[Swordmaker]

IMHO, the antedeluvian world was of smaller diameter.....there are “giant” human remains that may suggest this as well.

A couple of other posters have raised that possibility on this thread. However, that raises the question: "From where and when did the extra mass and volume appear?"

[mo]

The Saturn Myth theory is interesting.....

http://www.maverickscience.com/saturn.htm

[wendy1946]

I’ve seen several kinds of electric-gravity and expanding Earth theories to explain the larger dinosaurs. One thing I haven’t seen however is any sort of a theory to explain ancients building with stones too heavy for any technology, ancient or modern either one, to move. There are a couple of temple column stones like that in Baalbek Lebanon, and then what they call “geoglyphs” in Peru which amount to walls or something or other made with 200-ton fitted stones. Those things require reduced gravity as well?

[Swordmaker]

I’ve seen several kinds of electric-gravity and expanding Earth theories to explain the larger dinosaurs. One thing I haven’t seen however is any sort of a theory to explain ancients building with stones too heavy for any technology, ancient or modern either one, to move. There are a couple of temple column stones like that in Baalbek Lebanon, and then what they call “geoglyphs” in Peru which amount to walls or something or other made with 200-ton fitted stones. Those things require reduced gravity as well?

If attenuated gravity existed beyond the dinosaurs into human historic times, then yes, reduced gravity might help explain those monolithic stones. Mythology gives us some hints that it may have.

[js1138]

Hi Ted. Back so soon?