I wonder how much mass change of our planet there'd have to be to get the year to have 360 days in it?
I wonder how much mass change of our planet there'd have to be to get the year to have 360 days in it?
There could be other reasons for the count being "off" by five odd days. Maybe the guy doing the counting was sick like a dog for two weeks, and by the time he got back to making his scritches on the stone, he misremembered a few days due to fever delirium. Or, maybe they counted accurately, but used an invalid endpoint, due to viewing the sun's yearly position from "Stone A" to "Crotch of Tree B", not taking into account that "Tree B" would be growing.
There are probably plenty of other reasons for getting the count wrong, I just pulled those two off the top of my head.
Or, maybe they said, "365.25? That's nuts, just round it down to 360, it'll work fine, and the math's a lot easier." (Or maybe some scribe copied it that way, thinking he'd be doing the world a favor.)
It doesn't necessarily mandate a change in the planet's mass.
Now, on the other hand, I've wondered about dinosaurs, whose bones weren't strong enough to support their weight, and flying dinosaurs, that didn't have the lift or bone structure sufficient to allow flight.
I'm thinking that two things may have been at play here, that I haven't read of anyone else considering. (Maybe they have, but I haven't read it.) If the world was spinning faster on its axis, then centrifugal force would make everything on the surface seem to weigh less than it does now. (Even today, you'll weigh less at the equator, where you're traveling at about a thousand MPH, than you will at the poles, traveling at 0 MPH.)
Also, if the air pressure was significantly higher, the air would be denser, which would of course make any lifting surface much more efficient.