And then we have this from Encarta-I guess I’ll never know:
[Earth’s environment during the dinosaurian era was far different than it is today. The days were several minutes shorter than they are today because the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon have over time had a braking influence on Earth’s rotation. Radiation from the Sun was not as strong as it is today because the Sun has been slowly brightening over time.
Other changes in the environment may be linked to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, a gas that traps heat from the Sun in Earth’s atmosphere—the so-called greenhouse effect—was several times more abundant in the air during the dinosaurian age. As a result, surface temperatures were warmer and no polar ice caps could form.
The pattern of continents and oceans was also very different during the age of dinosaurs. At the beginning of the dinosaurian era, the continents were united into a gigantic supercontinent called Pangaea (all lands), and the oceans formed a vast world ocean called Panthalassa (all seas). About 200 million years ago, movements of Earth’s crust caused the supercontinent to begin slowly separating into northern and southern continental blocks, which broke apart further into the modern continents by the end of the dinosaurian era.
As a result of these movements of Earth’s crust (see Plate Tectonics), there was less land in equatorial regions than there is at present. Deserts, possibly produced by the warm, greenhouse atmosphere, were widespread across equatorial land, and the tropics were not as rich an environment for life forms as they are today. Plants and animals may have flourished instead in the temperate zones north and south of the equator.
The most obvious differences between dinosaurian and modern environments are the types of life forms present. There were fewer than half as many species of plants and animals on land during the Mesozoic Era than there are today. Bushes and trees appear to have provided the most abundant sources of food for dinosaurs, rather than the rich grasslands that feed most animals today. Although flowering plants appeared during the dinosaurian era, few of them bore nuts or fruit.
The animals of the period had slower metabolisms and smaller brains, suggesting that the pace of life was relatively languid and the behavior patterns were simple. The more active animals—such as ants, wasps, birds, and mammals—first made their appearance during the dinosaurian era but were not as abundant as they are now.
IV Behavior and Physiology
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The behavior of dinosaurs was governed by their metabolism and by their central nervous system. The dinosaurs’ metabolism—the internal activities that supply the body’s energy needs—affected their activity level. It is unclear whether dinosaurs were purely endothermic (warm-blooded), like modern mammals, or ectothermic (cold-blooded), like modern reptiles. Endotherms regulate their body temperature internally by means of their metabolism, rather than by using the temperature of their surroundings. As a result, they have higher activity levels and higher energy needs than ectotherms. Ectotherms have a slower metabolism and regulate their body temperature by means of their behavior, taking advantage of external temperature variations by sunning themselves to stay warm and resting in the shade to cool down. By determining whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded, paleontologists could discover whether dinosaurs behaved more like modern mammals or more like modern reptiles.]
It would be interesting to see what handle those two bodies grab to slow down the Earth's spin.
It would seem to me that the leading edge and the lagging edge would have the same amount of gravity tugging on them; thus a calcellation of gravitation drag.