John Keely
and
Scientific American
THE IMPOSSIBLE DINOSAURS
Ted Holden
A careful
study of the sizes of the giant dinosaurs and of what it would take to
deal with such sizes in our world. The felt effect of gravity being what
it is now, indicates that something was massively different in the world
which these creatures inhabited.
A look at sauropod dinosaurs as we
know them today requires that we relegate the brontosaur, once thought to
be one of the largest sauropods, to welterweight or at most middleweight
status. Fossil finds dating from the 1970's dwarf him. The
Avon field Guide to Dinosaurs shows a brachiosaur (larger than a
brontosaur), a supersaur, and an ultrasaur juxtaposed, and the ultrasaur
dwarfs the others.
Christopher McGowan's "Dinosaurs, Spitfires,
& Sea Dragons", Harvard, 1991 cites a 180 ton weight estimate for the
ultrasaur (page 118), and (page 104) describes the volume-based methods of
estimating dinosaur weights. McGowan is Curator of Vertebrate
Palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum.
This same look requires that
dinosaur lifting requirements be compared to human lifting
capabilities. One objection which might be raised to this would be
that animal muscle tissue was somehow "better" than that of humans. This,
however, is known not to be the case; for instance, from Knut Nielson's,
"Scaling, Why is Animal size So Important", Cambridge Univ Press, 1984,
page 163, we have:
"It appears that the maximum force or stress
that can be exerted by any
muscle is inherent in the structure of the
muscle filaments. The maximum
force is roughly 4 to 4 kgf/cm2
cross section of muscle (300-400 kN/m2).
This force is body-size
independent and is the same for mouse and elephant
muscle."
As
creatures get larger, weight, which is proportional to volume, goes up in
proportion to the cube of the increase in dimension. Strength, on
the other hand, is known to be roughly proportional to cross section of
muscle for any particular limb, and goes up in proportion to the square of
the increase in dimension. This is the familiar "square-cube"
problem. The normal calculation for this is to simply divide by 2/3
power of body weight, and this is indeed the normal scaling factor for all
weight lifting events, that is, it lets us tell if a 200 lb athlete
has actually done a "better" lift than the champion of the 180 lb
group.
Consider the case of Bill Kazmaier, the king of the power
lifters in the
seventies and eighties. Power lifters are, in the
author's estimation, the strongest of all athletes; they concentrate on
the three most difficult tota-body lifts, i.e. bench press, squat, and
dead-lift. They work out many hours a day and, it is fairly common
knowledge, use food to flavour their anabolic steroids with. No
animal the same weight as one of these men could be presumed to be as
strong. Kazmaier was able to do squats and dead lifts with weights
between 1000 and 1100 lbs on a bar, assuming he was fully warmed
up.
STANDING UP AT 70,000 LBS
Any animal has to be able to lift its
own weight off the ground, i.e. stand up, with no more difficulty than
Kazmaier experiences doing a 1000 lb squat. Consider, however, what would
happen to Mr. Kazmaier, were he to be scaled up to 70,000 lbs, the weight
commonly given for the brontosaur. Kazmaier's maximum effort at
standing, fully warmed up, assuming the 1000 lb squat, was 1340 lbs (1000
for the bar and 340 for himself). The scaled maximum lift would be a
solution to:
1340/340^.667 = x/70,000^.667 or
47,558 lbs.
That is to say, the maximum weight his muscles could lift
when scaled to the size of an Brontosaur would be 47,558 lbs. If he
weighed 70,000 lbs, he'd not be able to lift his weight off the
ground!
To believe then, that a brontosaur could stand at 70,000 lbs,
one has to
believe that a creature whose weight was largely gut and the
vast digestive mechanism involved in processing huge amounts of low-value
foodstuffs, was somehow stronger than a creature its size which was almost
entirely muscle, and far better trained and conditioned than would ever be
found amongst grazing animals. That is not only ludicrous in the
case of the brontosaur, but the calculations only get worse when you begin
trying to scale upwards to the supersaur and ultrasaur at their
sizes.
Another way to look at the problem of size vs. strength under
present Earth gravity is to ask- how heavy can an animal get to be in our
world? How heavy would Mr. Kazmaier be at the point at which the
square-cube problem made it as difficult for him just to stand up as it is
for him to do 1000 lb squats at his present size of 340 lbs? The
answer is simply the solution to:
1340/340^.667 =
x/x^.667
or just under 21,000 lbs. In reality, elephants do not
appear to get quite to that point. McGowan (Dinosaurs, Spitfires,
& Sea Dragons, p. 97) claims that a Toronto Zoo specimen was the
largest in North America at 14,300 lbs. One has no difficulty
visualizing the slow, lumbering, weight encumbered movements of
elephants. Clearly they are operating at the limits of biological
size.
Even the scaling up of the Rhinoceros, as the popular
Paleontologist Bob Bakker is fond of doing in defence of sauropod
mobility, would run you straight into the scaling formula cited above,
independent of leg length proportions.
Again, in all cases, we are
comparing the absolute maximum effort for a human weight lifter to lift
and hold something for two seconds versus the sauropod's requirement to
move around and walk all day long with scaled weight greater than these
weights involved in the maximum, one-shot, two-second effort.
That
just can't happen.
SAUROPOD DINOSAUR'S NECKS
A second category of
evidence for attenuated felt effect of gravity arises from the study of
sauropod dinosaurs' necks. Scientists who study sauropod dinosaurs
are now claiming that they held their heads low, because they could not
have gotten blood to their brains had they held them high. McGowan
(again, Dinosaurs, Spitfires & Sea Dragons) goes into this in detail
(pages 101-120). He mentions the fact that a giraffe's blood
pressure, at 200-300 mm Hg, far higher than that of any other animal,
would probably rupture the vascular system of any other animal, and is
maintained by thick arterial walls and by a very tight skin which
apparently acts like a jet pilot's pressure suit. A giraffe's head
might reach to 20 feet. How a sauropod might have gotten blood to
its brain at 50 or 60 feet is the real question.
Two articles which
mention this problem appeared in the 12/91 issue of Natural History.
In "Sauropods and Gravity", Harvey B. Lillywhite of Univ. Fla.,
Gainesville, notes:
"...in a Barosaurus with its head held high,
the heart had to work against a gravitational pressure of about 590 mm of
mercury (Hg). In order for the heart to eject blood into the
arteries of the neck, its pressure must exceed that of the blood pushing
against the opposite side of the outflow valve.
Moreover, some
additional pressure would have been needed to overcome the
resistance
of smaller vessels within the head for blood flow to meet
the
requirements for brain and facial tissues. Therefore, hearts of
Barosaurus must have generated pressures at least six times greater than
those of humans and three to four times greater than those of
giraffes."
In the same issue of Natural History, Peter Dodson
("Lifestyles of the Hugeand Famous"), mentions that: "Brachiosaurus was
built like a giraffe and may have fed like one. But most sauropods
were built quite differently. At the base of the neck, a sauropod's
vertebral spines unlike those of a giraffe, were weak and low and did not
provide leverage for the muscles required to elevate the head in a high
position. Furthermore, the blood pressure required to pump blood up
to the brain, thirty or more feet in the air, would have placed
extraordinary demands on the heart and would seemingly have placed the
animal at severe risk of a stroke, an aneurysm, or some other circulatory
disaster. If sauropods fed with the neck extended just a little
above heart level, say from ground level up to fifteen feet, the blood
pressure required would have been far more reasonable."
It turns out
that a problem every bit as bad or worse than the blood pressure problem
would arise, perceived gravity being what it is now, were sauropods to
hold their heads out just above horizontally as Dodson and others are
suggesting. Try holding your arm out horizontally for more than a
minute or two, and then imagine your arm being 40 feet long and 30,000
lbs...
An ultrasaur or seismosaur with a neck 40-60 feet long and
weighing 25000-40000 lbs, would be looking at 400,000 to nearly a million
foot pounds of torque were one of them to try to hold his neck out
horizontally.
That's crazy.
You don't hang a 30,000 lb load 40'
off into space even if it is made out of wood and structural materials,
much less flesh and blood. No building
inspector in America could
be bribed sufficiently to let you build such a
thing.
And so,
sauropods (in our gravity) couldn't stand, couldn't hold their heads
up, couldn't hold them out either. Moreover, the fossil record
shows that there were a large number of "giant" species- giant insects,
giant mammals such as a beaver the size of a Kodiak bear, giant fish and
flying creatures that have not survived into our present era. The
only way of making sense out of this evidence is to understand that at one
time and for whatever reason, the force of gravity operated differently on
planet Earth.
Ted's Website http://www.bearfabrique.org/
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