_Jim ~ How about an 'atmospheric density' change (e.g., 30% or twice the density that we have now)?
That would also explain how giant insects would get enough oxygen with their poor circulatory and respiratory systems.
Not only is there a random large scale blasting of the atmosphere into space by occasional giant meteor strikes, the atmosphere is continuously being blown off into space an atom at a time by solar wind and heat.
Over a couple billion years it adds up...
Even with the differing atmoshpheric pressures, just pumping blood from the heart of a sauropod to the brain ( over 30 feet UPHILL!!) seems impossible in our gravity.
If the mass of the Earth is constant, how could the gravitational force be stronger? Sometimes I just can't believe the mental gymnastics that people go through to try to explain out how some of these creatures could have existed or functioned. With all the "may have","would be needed", and "must have been", it's all speculation. Nobody KNOWS what the environment was that far back. There's no way to verify it. And evolutionists think creationists are silly for believing it was created as it is now?
Uniformitarian approaches to the evolution of terrestrial locomotor physiology and animal flight performance have generally presupposed the constancy of atmospheric composition. Recent geophysical data as well as theoretical models suggest that, to the contrary, both oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations have changed dramatically during defining periods of metazoan evolution. Hyperoxia in the late Paleozoic atmosphere may have physiologically enhanced the initial evolution of tetrapod locomotor energetics; a concurrently hyperdense atmosphere would have augmented aerodynamic force production in early flying insects. Multiple historical origins of vertebrate flight also correlate temporally with geological periods of increased oxygen concentration and atmospheric density. Arthropod as well as amphibian gigantism appear to have been facilitated by a hyperoxic Carboniferous atmosphere and were subsequently eliminated by a late Permian transition to hypoxia. For extant organisms, the transient, chronic and ontogenetic effects of exposure to hyperoxic gas mixtures are poorly understood relative to contemporary understanding of the physiology of oxygen deprivation. Experimentally, the biomechanical and physiological effects of hyperoxia on animal flight performance can be decoupled through the use of gas mixtures that vary in density and oxygen concentration. Such manipulations permit both paleophysiological simulation of ancestral locomotor performance and an analysis of maximal flight capacity in extant forms.