The Puzzle of Prehistoric Mega Fauna

Did you ever go to a natural history museum when you were young and marvel at the massive dinosaur skeletons on display? Those towering giants made a very big impression upon me when I was six. I bought the books, had the plastic toy. However, one question I never seriously asked, was why no earth are so many of the animals preserved in the fossil record vastly larger than the modern day descendents? This is not a question of small fast mammals out competing big slow dinosaurs in a nuclear-winter type environment caused by a massive asteroid collision. The fact of the matter is as I state on my main page, historical rhinos were 20 feet tall, ancient men were 16 feet tall, cockroaches were 2 feet long, etc, etc, etc. The fossil world demonstrates that all prehistoric life just existed on a different scale. Period. So while interesting, exactly what is the problem with all this?

The Bombshell

Let me explain the problem by reference to birds. Firstly you need to know how a wing works and what makes planes fly. Do not worry, this is not at all difficult. The top part of a wing is curved, and the bottom part is flat. This means that when air arrives at the front edge of the wing, the air going over the top has to go further to get to the rear edge of the wing. Because the air has to go further in the same time - it must move faster. Because it is moving faster it is more spread out and less dense. Therefore air pressure above the wing is lower than below the wing. The wing is therefore 'pulled,' up, into this area of low pressure. Simple. Right. Now the lifting ability of a wing depends upon surface area and increases with the square. This is only two numbers are involved, width and length. However, the mass or weight of a bird depends upon three factors, width, length, and depth. So mass increases with the cube. Hence at some point as birds grow larger, because mass increases faster than surface area, beyond a certain weight flight becomes impossible for birds. In the modern word, this is around 30 pounds. If that number does not mean much to you, think of a Swan or other such large bird. I've seen Swans in parks, beyond all question they can barely get off the water. Now, the problem is in the fossil record we have not 50 pound birds, but 200 pound birds. We can see there is simply no way these massive 200 pound birds could ever get off their bellies in the modern world. And if you are wondering how passenger jets get off the ground given what I have just said - the answer is they use a vastly more powerful power unit called a jet engine, which drives the air over the wings much faster than any flapping motion ever could, vastly increasing the lift potential of the wings. 

Big birds, and Big Dinos

Similar calculations can be made for land animals using muscle power to weight calculation - in effect  elephants are the heaviest land animal that can exist in the modern world. Even assuming dinosaurs has muscles stronger than world record holding weight lifters does not get may dinos off their bellies. I'll add some calculations here later to demonstrate this.

My Point Being

The data provided by thousands of fossils pints to only one conclusion - something was different about early earth that enabled organisms as a matter of routine to grow to sizes that are physically and mathematically impossible in the modern world. How could this be? Well, even convention textbooks admit CO2 levels were vastly higher in early Earth, as were oxygen levels, however, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that something else in addition was different as well, and the most obvious candidate is gravity.

What's Wrong with Saying Gravity Was Weaker?

A lot. It has me totally baffled. Gravity is a function of mass. The heavier something is, the greater its gravitation field. I do not see there as being any question about Newton's laws of motion here. I'm happy with them. I believe they are correct at sub light speeds. So, obviously, at first glance, weaker prehistoric gravity suggests the earth was much smaller in the past than it was today, that is with less mass, and not just physically smaller.

If you want to know my take on all this, I think the earth accretes mass from space debris.

Expanding Earth Links

Flash slide presentation
Dinosaurs and the expanding Earth
http://www.expanding-earth.org/ - Best site
Expanding earth and tectonics
http://www.wincom.net/earthexp/
http://www.johnkharms.com/planetary.htm

Also be thankful that the huge bird on the right can not fly due to today's stronger gravitational field. Otherwise no-one would ever dare go out of the house! Just look at it .... jeeesh.

Talkorigins.org has a faq on megafauna. They come up with some half baked ideas to try and refute the gravity theory without ever really landing killer blows. Most glaring of all they do not try to explain how 200 pound birds could fly. I appreciate you can argue Sauropods spent all day in the water - but you can not really argue birds flew in the water. Basically all the questions the faq tries to answer are valid, and the experts have no real solution other than to stick their heads in the sand, start shouting 'la-la-la-la-la,' and pretend they can not hear you.

In contrast to standard evolution sites which do their best to convince you we know everything about evolution, the purpose of this web site is the opposite. I am just trying to convince you we do not have all the answers. Another of the many puzzles in the fossil record that few academics today wish to talk about is mega fauna. I have written a sub page to deal with the whole issue of mega fauna and the surrounding issues. The problems raised are never going to get solved until people admit they exist and start talking about them. However problematic, there must be a perfectly rational explanation here somewhere, even if it is a catastrophic one.

'In the late 1950’s, during road construction in the Euphrates Valley of south-east Turkey, many tombs containing the remains of giants were uncovered. At the sites the leg bones were measured to be 120 cms (47.24 inches). Joe Taylor, Director of Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, was commissioned to sculpt the human femur. This giant stood some 14-16 ft tall (right). In his book Fossils Facts & Fantasies, Joe Taylor cites several accounts of giant human skeletons or depictions being discovered, from Egypt, Italy, Patagonia in Argentina, and the western US. The largest humans in recent history are like Robert Wadlow of Alton, IL who was just under 9ft tall .'

'Fossil ferns have been discovered the size of trees and horsetails once shot up over thirty feet tall. There were cockroaches about two feet long, as well as crickets, grasshoppers and monstrous spiders that thrived in a land of endless summer. Dragonflies with a three foot wingspan skimmed over swamps in which eight-foot beavers and sixty-foot cattails flourished. Beetles once grew to be the size of a baseball mitt and climbed up conifers that towered a hundred feet high. The fossil record is replete with examples of immense creatures that flourished in the past. Huge rodents like the giant guinea pig grew as big as a modern rhinoceros while the ancient rhino grew as big as a two-story building. (Note the 18 feet tall rhino from the University of Nebraska Museum.)' Link