Does shilling for Apple turn your brain to putty or something?
It is interesting to see Ted anonymously puffing his own piece. I thought he had been banned from FR under his 10 previous login names. Maybe the rule against signing up under new names has been lifted.
IANHM placemarker.
Does using Windows require you to be insulting?
I have no knowledge of a Ted Holden ever being a member of FreeRepublic, banned or not. You seem to have had a problem with him in the past. Why?
I see nothing anonymous about this article. I placed the name of the author on it.
I am well informed on the biological mechanics involved and I find the subject matter intriguing and the questions he raises deserve answers, not off hand dismissal and certainly not derision if you DON'T HAVE an answer. Ignoring a fact is not part of the scientific method.
Having said that, what is YOUR explanation for:
Carpenter scaled up a Diplodocus to fit this new super-sized vertebra, and his Amphicoelias fragillimus measures a full 58 meters (190 feet) from snout to tail. The estimated mass of this mega-sauropod would be about 122,400 kg (about 270,000 lbs or 135 tons).
An average elephant is only 10 feet tall at the shoulders and weighs in at around 10,000 pounds. If we multiply the height, width, and length of our average elephant by 3 times (estimated from comparing the elephant in the above picture with that largest Dino's torso, tail base to neck base), we get the 27 times factor (33) of the square cube law requires for the fragillimus' mass, but that's ignoring the neck and tail... something tells me that the paleontologists are under calculating the tonnage because it would get absolutely ridiculous if they add those in... Anyway, that still huge. The mass the muscle has to move is 27 times what it was but the cross sectional area is only 9 times larger. Since muscle strength is apparently directly proportional to cross sectional area, how can a muscle that is only ideally 9 times stronger, lift a limb or body that is 27 times heavier? What chemical process drove their muscles yhen that now doesn't drive ours?
Another interesting thought... an average modern elephant eats approximately 4.5% of its body weight in food every day... scaling that up to our mega-saurus, that would translate to ~12,000 lbs of forage a day for our fragillimus... he'd have to keep moving to eat that much. The elephant drinks 1 Gallon of water per 50 lbs of weight per day... the fragillimus would have to drink 5400 gallons of water everyday to keep up with the elephant... again, he'd have to keep moving... fairly rapidly, I'd think.