Does using Windows require you to be insulting?
I have no knowledge of a Ted Holden ever being a member of FreeRepublic, banned or not. You seem to have had a problem with him in the past. Why?
I see nothing anonymous about this article. I placed the name of the author on it.
I am well informed on the biological mechanics involved and I find the subject matter intriguing and the questions he raises deserve answers, not off hand dismissal and certainly not derision if you DON'T HAVE an answer. Ignoring a fact is not part of the scientific method.
Having said that, what is YOUR explanation for:
- the ability of Teratorn's (one fossil specimen of Argentavis magnificens has a wingspan of 830 cm or 27 feet compared to a female California Condor's maximum wingspan of around 9 feet) to fly - if conditions when it lived were the same as today where the same conditions will not allow modern birds of similar build, scaled up to equal the size of the teratorn, to fly? The Teratorn is 3 times larger than the Condor so, using the square cube law, it has 9 times the surface area (staying warm might be a problem) but should then weigh, assuming proportionality in all internal organs and build (the bones seem to be just proportional larger versions of the smaller birds' bones), 27 times more than our 23 lb Condor... a mind boggling 621 pounds! That's some bird.
- extinct 32" dragon flies, proportionately identical to their largest modern 8" version, that were able to fly? Or were their elaborate wings only decorative? These insects are 4 times larger than their modern cousins... they would have to have 16 times as much surface area as the modern one and 64 times the volume and presumably the mass, if internals were also proportional. How did they fly? Were their muscles 64 times stronger?
- Seismosaurus and other mega-fauna's seeming ability to ignore the Square Cube law and still be able to walk around?
The new "largest dinosaur," Amphicoelias fragillimus, the black one on the left.
A previous "largest dinosaur," Seismosaurus, fits under the tail.Carpenter scaled up a Diplodocus to fit this new super-sized vertebra, and his Amphicoelias fragillimus measures a full 58 meters (190 feet) from snout to tail. The estimated mass of this mega-sauropod would be about 122,400 kg (about 270,000 lbs or 135 tons).
An average elephant is only 10 feet tall at the shoulders and weighs in at around 10,000 pounds. If we multiply the height, width, and length of our average elephant by 3 times (estimated from comparing the elephant in the above picture with that largest Dino's torso, tail base to neck base), we get the 27 times factor (33) of the square cube law requires for the fragillimus' mass, but that's ignoring the neck and tail... something tells me that the paleontologists are under calculating the tonnage because it would get absolutely ridiculous if they add those in... Anyway, that still huge. The mass the muscle has to move is 27 times what it was but the cross sectional area is only 9 times larger. Since muscle strength is apparently directly proportional to cross sectional area, how can a muscle that is only ideally 9 times stronger, lift a limb or body that is 27 times heavier? What chemical process drove their muscles yhen that now doesn't drive ours?
Another interesting thought... an average modern elephant eats approximately 4.5% of its body weight in food every day... scaling that up to our mega-saurus, that would translate to ~12,000 lbs of forage a day for our fragillimus... he'd have to keep moving to eat that much. The elephant drinks 1 Gallon of water per 50 lbs of weight per day... the fragillimus would have to drink 5400 gallons of water everyday to keep up with the elephant... again, he'd have to keep moving... fairly rapidly, I'd think.