The recent announcement by celebrity paleontologist James Kirkland of the Falcarius utahensis, a new configuration of dinosaur bones, carried with it pictures of Kirkland standing in front of a full-size cast of the current concept of dinosaur bone arrangement. You can probably find the picture by image googling the topic. The full-size cast shows a dinosaur with the usual long neck, narrow rib cage, long tail and short forearms standing on long, bird-like legs, the source of the absurd notion that dinosaurs and birds are closely related species in the Darwinian fantasy of species evolution. The announcement leads me to print a few paragraphs from Let's Talk Flying Saucers: How Crackpot Ideas Are Blinding Us to Reality and Leading Us to Extinction.
The discovery of the first dinosaur bones started a story that is so characteristic of our hired bumpkins that it's laughable, a story that continues today with movie producers replacing science as the primary imagers of our concepts of reality. Naturally, when the first bones were brought to the attention of the scientific community in the 19th century, the cry of "Fraud!" was heard across the land. Our scientists, devoid of originality and incapable of providing answers to even the most obvious questions about the reality that surrounds us, are quick to decry any disturbance of the status quo of ignorance that might actually disclose that ignorance. They always use the claim of fraud every time new information comes along, unless that is, the information is so far from reality that it wouldn't disclose scientific ignorance. There's no scientific temerity in proclaiming from one end of the Earth to the other the absolutely confirmed reality of some new pulsating black hole a myopic practitioner just observed at the end of the universe just this side the beginning of time, but uncover a mound, or even a thousand mounds containing eight foot human skeletons and you're in for a thumping, even jail time.
The scientific cry of fraud over dinosaur bones was drowned out by the sheer volume of their discoveries, and our gallant recalcitrants, after the better part of the 18th century, had to adjust the visors of their armor and venture forth into the field of pedantry, speculating in no uncertain terms what we were dealing with.
We were either dealing with giant lizards or we were dealing with great beasts.
The reason that everyone had as their first impression that the bones belonged to giant lizards was that the bones seemed to fit together so that the legs were splayed out to the side like the legs of a lizard. But the science of our serfs is not a matter of fitting reality together, it's a method of calculation, of figuring out how reality really should fit together. The way reality should be is found with the use of the indisputable mathematics where, because one plus one always equals two, a bone that would support a cubic yard of meat always supported a cubic yard of meat.
Looking at the massive bones, empiricists asked the all important question, "By golly those bones are big, how much flesh could they hold?"
Rooted firmly in the question is a hidden assumption about the weight of the flesh.
The question assumes that the answer can be discovered because the weight of flesh is the product of a gravity that is caused by mass and the mass of the Earth, unchangeable, would have been the same when the creature with the big bones lived as it was when the bones were discovered.
To put the matter simply, if we have a pound of calcium, the calcium weighs a pound because the pull of gravity is attempting to move it against the surface of the scale we are using to measure the weight. If we believe that gravity is a static property of mass, then we know with absolute certainty that when the animal lived in the past, no matter how far back in the past, that pound of calcium would have weighed a pound. We can therefore calculate the strength of the bone made up of the calcium and compute how much meat to put on it by subtracting the weight of the bone from the total amount of weight the bone could hold.
But what if the impossible were true?
When we look at the moon, we see a cooled off hunk of rock. It is a sphere like the Earth, it even has what look like seabeds on its surface, so we might conclude that the moon was once warm like the Earth. Venus is downright hot, but Mars is also cold with surface features that indicate that it really was warm at one time and while the moon only has the sea and ocean beds as evidence for water, Mars has dried-up riverbeds, dried-up lake beds and sedimentary deposits that could only have been left by massive amounts of the nonexistent water.
What if, instead of heating up year after year under the noonday sun, the Earth is actually cooling off. After all, it is sitting in the zero temperature of space, as cold as cold can get. If a few of our hired hands don't believe space is cold, all they have to do is stick one of their own hands outside the window of the space shuttle, if it ever gets up there again. It'll freeze right in place.
What if the Earth had been hotter in the past and gravity, instead of being proportional to the amount of matter, is proportional to what the matter is doing, cooling?
What if a planet has a stronger field of gravity when it is young and hot, and that gravity lessens as the planet cools off in the cold darkness of space? It's not so far fetched. After all, the product of cooling, electromagnetic emissions, diminish the same way gravity diminishes, inversely with the square of the distance from their source.
If this unthinkable thought were pursued, then our pound of calcium would have weighed more in the past when the Earth was hotter than it weighs today. Not only would the calcium have weighed more, but the flesh it evolved to hold would also have weighed more.
What would be the result of such an impossible possibility? Would it solve some of the problems raised by the dinosaur bones that litter the surface of the Earth?
When the empiricists first measured the amount of weight the dinosaur bones would hold, they found that the amount of meat was too much for the dinosaurs to have walked like lizards. Picture the huge movie dinosaurs we see lumbering along the sparse forest lands that are pictured to be their food source to get the idea. With stomachs that size, any creature with legs attached so that they splayed off to the side like a lizard's would have to have a ten-foot deep trench to walk in. The stomach would need the ten-foot trench just so the legs could touch the ground and do the walking.
Now, the empiricists exclaimed, either the Earth was covered with ten-foot trenches at the time of the dinosaurs so they could walk, or their legs were attached so that they stood upright.
This is indisputable science at its best. All anyone had to do to prove that the dinosaurs walked upright and not like alligators, crocodiles and lizards was to note that the land wasn't covered with ten-foot deep trenches.
Proof simple. No trenches, so the dinosaurs walked upright.
But wait a minute. Even though the dinosaurs walked upright, they still had too much flesh on their bones to walk at all. After all, elephants couldn't even jump over an ant, let alone a ditch, and these things made elephants look like mice. How can it be that the dinosaurs were too big to walk?
Empirical science, ever capable, stepped forward with the answer. Just like Newton's mass based gravity worked because it could be used to demonstrate density, the dinosaur's size could be used to demonstrate that the Earth was filled with swamps, which, although like the ten foot deep ditches, don't exist, did when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth otherwise they couldn't have roamed the Earth.
The only way that the dinosaurs, with their huge bulk, could walk the face of the Earth was if their weight was displaced by water. They lived walking up to their necks in water, a scientific fact whose absurdity was surpassed only by the notion that oil fields are formed by dead dinosaur carcasses. The artwork dealing with dinosaurs for the first five or six decades of the 20th century shows the Earth as one big swamp populated by dinosaurs. Of course, having dinosaurs up to their necks in water didn't work too well for the moviemakers, who quickly put them running around on land, but no scientific explanation was needed to make the transition.
We may not know how life formed on Earth or how species came to be as we find them, but there is one thing we can be fairly certain about, and that is creatures that can't exist in the environment simply don't exist in the environment. Thus, the fact that dinosaurs could not have moved with the amount of flesh that has to be put on their bones by measuring the weight of that flesh under present day measurements of weight should have raised a flag for our scientists about the nature of their assumption that gravity is a static property of matter.
If we assume that the Earth was warmer when the dinosaurs roamed it, and that gravity is actually the result of what matter is doing, cooling, rather than a result of its mere existence, then when we measure the strength of the dinosaur bones to determine the weight the bones would hold, we would assume that both the bones and the flesh the bones evolved to hold weighed more than they would today.
If we make that assumption, we end up with bones that held a normal amount of flesh, proportionally, the same amount of flesh that lizard bones support today. The bones had to be bigger than the bones today simply because they had to be strong enough to support their own weight against the stronger gravity. However, once the bones formed large to hold their own weight, they only needed to hold the weight of the flesh that constituted the living lizard.
Dinosaurs were actually very big lizards rather than the bulbous creatures we see manufactured on movie screens. Once we realize the dinosaurs were actually proportional, we can go back into the museums and take the bones apart, remove the giant sloth bones we had to add to make the creatures stand upright, and reattach the legs the way they fit, splayed out to the side.
We can also forget about all the dead-end scientific arguments that have come up since we found that the Earth was not one big swamp in the past, that it actually had less water, not more, and that the moviemakers' vision of the dinosaurs living on the land is actually right. The absurd but endless blatherings about how their tiny hearts could pump blood up ten stories or how they needed second brains at the tip of their tails to move around or how they could feed themselves through such small mouths and long necks vanish.
They were lean and probably not so mean.
Once we take them out of the water, put their legs in place and make them the oversized cold-blooded lizards they were, we can place them in the lush vegetation and plentiful food of the tropical climate a warmer planet would have produced.
But we can't alter our pictures of the dinosaurs so that they reflect the actual reality of evolution, that creatures don't evolve that can't move, feed themselves, or for that matter, exist, simply because we are constrained by mass based gravity, the concept that gravity is a mystical property of matter. The reality of the dinosaurs is illusive in the face of the certainty of the mass based gravity concept. Gravity as a property of matter couldn't possibly be wrong because everybody believes it to be right.
Nothing, not even reality, can stand in the face of the certitude of scientific belief.
The field of dinosaur study, then, becomes one more scientific endeavor so complex as to defy rational analysis, a place where our studious layabouts can roam freely without fear of the embarrassment that would result if anyone realized that all of the knowledge they were producing amounted to nothing.
Because we know absolutely nothing about the nature of dinosaurs using gravity as a static property of mass, what happened to them is open to perpetual argument The idea that they perished simply because they were huge cold-blooded lizards that could not survive the colder climate as the Earth cooled off in space is ridiculous because they weren't lizards, they were ten story high animals who lived during a time when the Earth's temperature was the same as it is today.
And it takes an astronomer to tell us what happened to them. Why, a big old asteroid hit the Earth filling the atmosphere with a cloud of dust which blotted out the sun thereby cooling the temperature which froze the cold-blooded dears paving the way for us mammals and all this happened on an Earth that doesn't cool off in space, but forever stays its balmy self.
In reality, the dinosaurs perished because, as the Earth cooled, cold-blooded lizards that size, with no way to regulate their internal heat, simply couldn't survive the colder climate. The Earth was more habitable to the mammals that could regulate their internal body heat against the ever-coming cold.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com