Author: Ted Holden Most of the evidence being presented in support of the Saturn Myth conc
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Author: Ted Holden
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Most of the evidence being presented in support of the Saturn
Myth concept is either historical and heavily dependant upon
interpretations of mythological and classical themes, or of a
highly theoretical nature (e.g. Rose's explaination for the
Tethys Sea). Do we have any more concrete evidence, or any real
way of knowing or of proving that the Saturn Myth scenario is
actually required for any of the physical evidence of past ages?
I believe that we do, and that a careful study of the sizes of
antediluvian creatures 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. I believe that
something entirely like the Saturn Myth is positively required
to explain what turns up upon such a careful investigation. In
fact, I believe that there are at least five categories of
evidence which suggest that the super animals of Earth's past
could not live in our present world at all, due to what must
have been a change in perceived gravity.
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 Paleontology 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
independant and is the same for mouse and elephant muscle. The
reason for this uniformity is that the dimensions of the thick
and thin muscle filaments, and also the number of cross-bridges
between them are the same. In fact the structure of mouse
muscle and elephant muscle is so similar that a microscopist
would have difficulty identifying them except for a larger
number of mitrochondria in the smaller animal. This uniformity
in maximum force holds not only for higher vertibrates, but for
many other organisms, including at least some, but not all
invertibrates."
Another objection might be that sauropods were aquatic
creatures. Nobody believes that anymore; they had no adaptation
for aquatic life, their teeth show wear and tear which does not
come from eating soft aquatic vegetation, and trackways show
them walking on land with no difficulty.
A final objection would be that dinosaurs were somehow more
"efficient" than top human athletes. This, however, goes
against all observed data. As creatures get bulkier, they
become less efficient; the layers of thick muscle in limbs begin
to get in each others way and bind to some extent. For this
reason, scaled lifts for the super-heavyweight athletes are
somewhat lower than for, say, the 200 lb athletes.
By "scaled lift", I mean of course a lift record divided by the
two-thirds power of the athlete's body weight. 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, which is similar to
pr2 , and goes up in proportion to the square of the increase in
dimension. This is the familiar "square-cube" problem. The
normal inverse operator 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, i.e. it lets us tell if a
200 lb athlete has actually done a "better" lift than the
champion of the 180 lb group. For athletes roughly between 160
and 220 lbs, i.e. whose bodies are fairly similar, these scaled
lift numbers line up very nicely. It is then fairly easily seen
that a lift for a scaled up version of one particular athlete
can be computed via this formula, since the similarity will be
perfect, scaling being the only difference.
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 total-body lifts, i.e.
benchpress, squat, and dead-lift. They work out many hours a
day and, it is fairly common knowledge, use food to flavor 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
This brings us to the first of the five categories of evidence I
mentioned above. 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. He'd not be able to
lift his weight off the ground!
A sauropod dinosaur had four legs you might say; what happens if
Mr. Kazmaier uses arms AND legs at 70,000 lbs. The truth is
that the squat uses almost every muscle in the athlete's body
very nearly to the limits, but in this case, it doesn't even
matter. A near maximum benchpress effort for Mr. Kazmaier would
fall around 600 lbs. This merely changes the 1340 to 1940 in
the equation above, and the answer comes out as 68,853. Even
using all muscles, some more than once, the strongest man who we
know anything about would not be able to lift his own weight off
the ground at 70,000 lbs!
To believe then, that a brontosaur could stand at 70,000 lbs,
one has to believe that a creature whose weight was mostly 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 that 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.
How heavy can an animal still get to be in our world, then? 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:
1340/340667 = x/x^.667 , or (using the usual Newton's process)
20,803 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, and Smithsonian personnel once informed
the author that the gigantic bush elephant specimen which
appears at their Museum of Natural History weighed around 8 tons.
Now, a number of what I refer to as the regular crew members of t.o
will always be quick to point out what they regard as fatal flaws in all
of this reasoning. They note that 150 lb chimps have been observed
doing some unspecified kind of an arm pull (chimps are mostly arms) at
600 or 700 lbs or something. Suppose a 150 lb chimp actually was
somehow magically stronger than any human powerlifter and could do a
squat with 1200 lbs on a bar. The same calculations I have used, e.g.
1350/150^(2/3) = x/x^(2/3) says that this super chimp would still be
unable to stand at any weight above 110,000 lbs, and remember that most
sources give a weight figure of 360,000 lbs for the ultrasaur.
Again, in all cases, we are comparing the absolute max 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 Dinosaurs' Necks
A second category of evidence for attenuated felt effect of
gravity in antediluvian times 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'.
How a sauropod might have gotten blood to its brain at 50' or
60' 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
resistence 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 Huge and 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 (see opposite page)
[Lillywhite's article] and would seemingly have placed the
animal at severe risk of a stroke, an aneurism, 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."
Dodson is neglecting what appears to be a dilemma in the case of
the brachiosaur, but there are at least two far greater dilemmas
here. One is that the good leaves were, in all likelihood,
above the 20' mark; holding his head out at 20', an ultrasaur
would, in all likelihood, starve.
Moreover, 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.
The volume-based techniques which McGowan and others use can be
used to estimate weight for a sauropod's neck, given a scale
model and a weight figure for the entire dinosaur. An ultrasaur
is generally thought to be a near cousin of the brachiosaur, if
not simply a very large specimen of brachiosaur. The technique,
then is to measure the volume of water which the sauropod's neck
(severed at the shoulders and filled with bondo (auto-body
putty) displaces, versus the volume which the entire brachiosaur
displaces, and simply extrapolate to the 360,000 lb figure for
the ultrasaur. The author did this using a Larami Corp. model of a
brachiosaur, which is to scale. To make a long story short, the
neck from the shoulders outward weighs 28,656 lbs, and the
center of gravity of that neck is 15' from the shoulders, the
neck itself being 38' long. This equates to 429,850 foot pounds
of torque.
The muscles in the creatures neck (and in our necks as well) are
working simply to close the ends of a 'V', the processes of the
adjoining vertebrae. It is clearly seen that we have force on one end
of this equation, and torque on the other; the two must be
proportional. If we assume that the saur must have been able to lift
its head at least as easily as a human withy an 18" neck can move his
against a neck-exercise machine set to 130 lbs, then we see that the
saur would require the muscular strength of a neck 17.4' in diameter.
The much more reasonable assumption of effort being equivalant to the
human using a 50 lb. setting requires a neck of over 20' for the saur.
This assumes something like one foot from shoulders to the back of the
head for the human athlete and, of course, that force is proportional
to cross-section, as is well known.
The saur's neck, however, from the model, appears to have been something
like 10'x7' at the widest point at its base, and to have rapidly
narrowed down to around 6-7' in diameter.
Therefore, in our gravity at least, holding its neck out horizontally
would not be an option for the sauropod.
McGowan and others claim that the head and neck were supported
by a dorsal ligament and not muscles, but real-life experience
does not show us any example of a living creature using
ligaments to support a body structure which its available
musculature was many-to-one out of ballpark for dealing with. It
isn't difficult to think of things which would go wrong with
such a scheme, after about the first five seconds.
And so, sauropods (in our gravity) couldn't hold their heads
up, and they couldn't hold them out either. That doesn't leave
much. And I haven't even mentioned the dilemma involving their
tails.
Antediluvian Flying Creatures
A third category of evidence for attenuated felt effect of
gravity in antediluvian times arises from studies of creatures
which flew in those times, and of creatures which fly now.
In the antediluvian world, 350 lb flying creatures soared in
skys which no longer permit flying creatures above 30 lbs or so.
Modern birds of prey (the Argentinian teratorn) weighing 170 -
200 lbs with wingspans of 30' also flew; within recorded
history, central asians have been trying to breed hunting eagles
for size and strength, and have not gotten them beyond 25 lbs or
thereabouts. At that point they are able to take off only with
the greatest difficulty. Something was vastly different in the
pre-flood world.
Nothing much larger than 30 lbs or so flies anymore, and those
creatures, albatrosses and a few of the largest condors and
eagles, are marginal. Albatrosses in particular are called
"goonie birds" by sailors because of the extreme difficulty they
experience taking off and landing, their landings being (badly)
controlled crashes, and all of this despite long wings made for
maximum lift.
The felt effect of the force of gravity on earth was much less
in remote times, and only this allowed such giant creatures to
fly. No flying creature has since RE-EVOLVED into anything like
former sizes, and the one or two birds which have retained such
sizes have forfeited any thought of flight, their wings becoming
vestigial.
A book of interest here is Adrian Desmond's "The Hot Blooded
Dinosaurs. Desmond has a good deal to say about the pteranodon,
the 40 - 50 lb pterosaur which scientists used to believe to be
the largest creature which ever flew:
"Pteranodon had lost its teeth, tail and some flight
musculature, and its rear legs had become spindly. It was,
however, in the actual bones that the greatest reduction of
weight was achieved. The wing bones, backbone and hind limbs
were tubular, like the supporting struts of an aircraft, which
allows for strength yet cuts down on weight. In Pteranodon
these bones, although up to an inch in diameter, were no more
than cylindrical air spaces bounded by an outer bony casing no
thicker than a piece of card. Barnum Brown of the American
Museum reported an armbone fragment of an unknown species of
pterosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Texas in which 'the
culmination of the pterosaur... the acme of light construction'
was achieved. Here, the trend had continued so far that the
bone wall of the cylinder was an unbelievable one-fiftieth of an
inch thick Inside the tubes bony crosswise struts no thicker
than pins helped to strengthen the structure, another innovation
in aircraft design anticipated by the Mezosozoic pterosaurs.
The combination of great size and negligible weight must
necessarily have resulted in some fragility. It is easy to
imagine that the paper-thin tubular bones supporting the
gigantic wings would have made landing dangerous. How could the
creature have alighted without shattering all of its bones How
could it have taken off in the first place It was obviously
unable to flap twelve-foot wings strung between straw-thin
tubes. Many larger birds have to achieve a certain speed by
running and flapping before they can take off and others have to
produce a wing beat speed approaching hovering in order to rise.
To achieve hovering with a twenty-three foot wingspread,
Pteranodon would have required 220 lbs of flight muscles as
efficient as those in humming birds. But it had reduced its
musculature to about 8 lbs, so it is inconceivable that
Pteranodon could have taken off actively.
Pteranodon, then, was not a flapping creature, it had neither
the muscles nor the resistance to the resulting stress. Its
long, thin albatross-like wings betray it as a glider, the most
advanced glider the animal kingdom has produced. With a weight
of only 40 lbs the wing loading was only I lb per square foot.
This gave it a slower sinking speed than even a man-made glider,
where the wings have to sustain a weight of at least 4 lbs per
square foot. The ratio of wing area to total weight in
Pteranodon is only surpassed in some of the insects. Pteranodon
was constructed as a glider, with the breastbone, shoulder
girdle and backbone welded into a box-like rigid fuselage, able
to absorb the strain from the giant wings. The low weight
combined with an enormous wing span meant that Pteranodon could
glide at ultra-low speeds without fear of stalling. Cherrie
Bramwell of Reading University has calculated that it could
remain aloft at only 15 m.p.h. So take-off would have been
relatively easy. All Pteranodon needed was a breeze of 15
m.p.h. when it would face the wind, stretch its wings and be
lifted into the air like a piece of paper. No effort at all
would have been required. Again, if it was forced to land on
the sea, it had only to extend its wings to catch the wind in
order to raise itself gently out of the water. It seems strange
that an animal that had gone to such great lengths to reduce its
weight to a minimum should have evolved an elongated bony crest
on its skull."
Desmond has mentioned some of the problems which even the
pteranodon faced at fifty lbs or so; no possibility of flapping
the wings for instance. The giant PTEROTORN finds of Argentina
were not known when the book was written... they came out in
the eighties in issues of Science Magazine and other places.
The Pterotorn was a 160 - 200 lb eagle with a 27' wingspan, a
modern bird whose existence involved flapping wings, aerial
maneuver etc. How so? There are a couple of other problems
which Desmond does not mention, including the fact that life for
a pure glider would be almost impossible in the real world, and
that some limited flying ability would be necessary for any
aerial creature. Living totally at the mercy of the winds, a
creature might never get back home to its nest and children
given the first contrary wind.
There is one other problem. Desmond notes a fairly reasonably
modus operandi for the pteranodon, i.e. that it had a throat
pouch like a pelican, has been found with fish fossils
indicating a pelican-like existence, soaring over the waves and
snapping up fish without landing. That should indicate that,
peculiarly amongst all of the creatures of the earth, the
pteranodon should have been practically IMMUNE from the great
extinctions of past ages. Velikovsky noted that large animals
had the greatest difficulty getting to high ground and other
safe havens at the times of floods and the global catastrophes
of past ages and were therefore peculiarly susceptible to
extinction. Ovid notes (Metamorphoses) that men and animals hid
on mountain tops during the deluge, but that most died from lack
of food during the hard year following. But high places safe
from flooding were always there; oceans were always there and
fish were always there. The pteranodon's way of life should
have been impervious to all mishap; the notion that pteranodon
died out when the felt effect of gravity on earth changed after
the flood is the only good explanation.
Back to Adrian Desmond for more on size as related to
pterosaurs now:
"It would be a grave understatement to say that, as a flying
creature, Pteranodon was large. Indeed, there were sound
reasons for believing that it was the largest animal that ever
could become airborne. With each increase in size, and
therefore also weight, a flying animal needs a concomitant
increase in power (to beat the wings in a flapper and to hold
and manoeuvre them in a glider), but power is supplied by
muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure.
-- The larger a flyer becomes the disproportionately weightier
it grows by the addition of its own power supply. There comes a
point when the weight is just too great to permit the machine to
remain airborne. Calculations bearing on size and power
suggested that the maximum weight that a flying vertebrate can
attain is about 50 lbs: Pteranodon and its slightly larger but
lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx were therefore thought
to be the largest flying animals."
Notice that the calculations mentioned say about 50 lbs is max
for either a flier or a glider, and that experience from our
present world absolutely coincides with this and, in fact, don't
go quite that high; the biggest flying creatures which we
actually see are albatrosses, geese etc. at around 30 - 35 lbs.
Similarly, my calculations say that about 20000 lbs would be the
largest theoretically possible land animal in our present world,
and Jumbo the stuffed elephant which I've mentioned, the largest
known land animal from our present world, was around 16000.
"But in 1972 the first of a spectacular series of finds
suggested that we must drastically rethink our ideas on the
maximum size permissible in flying - vertebrates. Although
excavations are still in progress, three seasons' digging - from
1972 to 1974 - by Douglas A. Lawson of the University of
California has revealed partial skeletons of three ultra-large
pterosaurs in the Big Bend National Park in Brewster County,
Texas These skeletons indicate creatures that must have dwarfed
even Pteranodon. Lawson found the remains off four wings, a
long neck, hind legs and toothless jaws in deposits that were
non-marine; the ancient entombing sediments are thought to have
been made instead by floodplain silting. The immense size of
the Big Bend pterosaurs, which have already become known
affectionately in the palaeontological world as '747s' or
'Jumbos', may be gauged by setting one of the Texas upper arm
bones alongside that of a Pteranodon: the 'Jumbo' humerus is
fully twice the length of Pteranodon's. Lawson's computer
estimated wingspan for this living glider is over fifty feet It
is no surprise, says Lawson announcing the animal in Science in
1975, that the definitive remains of this creature were found in
Texas.
Unlike Pteranodon, these creatures were found in rocks that were
formed 250 miles inland of the Cretaceous coastline. The lack
of even lake deposits in the vicinity militates against these
particular pterosaurs having been fishers. Lawson suggests that
they were carrion feeders, gorging themselves on the rotting
mounds of flesh left after the dismembering of a dinosaur
carcass. Perhaps, like vultures and condors, these pterosaurs
hung in the air over the corpse waiting their turn. Having
alighted on the carcass, their toothless beaks would have
restricted them to feeding upon the soft, pulpy internal organs.
How they could have taken to the air after gorging themselves
is something of a puzzle. Wings of such an extraordinary size
could not have been flapped when the animal was grounded. Since
the pterosaurs were unable to run in order to launch themselves
they must have taken off vertically. Pigeons are only able to
take-off vertically by reclining their bodies and clapping the
wings in front of them; as flappers, the Texas pterosaurs would
have needed very tall stilt-like legs to raise the body enough
to allow the 24-foot wings to clear the ground The main
objection, however, still rests in the lack of adequate
musculature for such an operation. Is the only solution to
suppose that, with wings fully extended and elevators raised,
they were lifted passively off the ground by the wind? If Lawson
is correct and the Texas pterosaurs were carrion feeders another
problem is envisaged. Dinosaur carcasses imply the presence of
dinosaurs. The ungainly Brobdignagian pterosaurs were
vulnerable to attack when grounded, so how did they escape the
formidable dinosaurs? Left at the mercy of wind currents,
take-off would have been a chancy business. Lawson's exotic
pterosaurs raise some intriguing questions. Only continued
research will provide the answers."
Note that Desmond mentions a number of ancillary problems, any
of which would throw doubt on the pterosaur's ability to exist
as mentioned, and neglects the biggest question of all: the
calculations which say 50 lbs are max have not been shown to be
in error; we have simply discovered larger creatures. Much
larger. This is what is called a dilemma.
Then I come to what Robert T. Bakker has to say about the Texas
Pterosaurs ("The Dinosaur heresies", Zebra Books, pp 290-291:
"Immediately after their paper came out in Science, Wann
Langston and his students were attacked by aeronautical
engineers who simply could not believe that the big Bend dragon
had a wingspan of forty feet or more. Such dimensions broke all
the rules of flight engineering; a creature that large would
have broken its arm bones if it tried to fly... Under this hail
of disbelief, Langston and his crew backed off somewhat. Since
the complete wing bones hadn't been discovered, it was possible
to reconstruct the Big Bend Pterodactyl [pterosaur] with wings
much shorter than fifty feet."
The original reconstruction had put wingspan for the pterosaur
at over 60'. Bakker goes on to say that he believes the
pterosaurs really wre that big and that they simply flew despite
our not comprehending how, i.e. that the problem is ours. He
does not give a solution as to what we're looking at the wrong
way.
So much for the idea of anything RE-EVOLVING into the sizes of
the flying creatures of the antedeluvian world. What about the
possibility of man BREEDING something like a pteratorn? Could
man actively breed even a 50 lb eagle?
David Bruce's "Bird of Jove", Ballentine Books, 1971, describes
the adventures of Sam Barnes, one of England's top falconers at
the time, who actually brought a Berkut eagle out of Kirghiz
country to his home in Pwllheli, Wales. Berkuts are the biggest
eagles, and Atlanta, the particular eagle which Barnes brought
back, at 26 lbs in flying trim, is believed to be as large as
they ever get. These, as Khan Chalsan explained to Barnes, have
been bred specifically for size and ferocity for many centuries.
They are the most prized of all possessions amongst nomads, and
are the imperial hunting bird of the turko-mongol peoples.
The eagle Barnes brought back had a disease for which no cure
was available in Kirghiz, and was near to death then, otherwise
there would have been no question of his having her. Chalsan
explained that a Berkut of Atlanta's size would normally be
worth more than a dozen of the most beautiful women in his
country.
The killing powers of a big eagle are out of proportion to its
size. Berkuts are normally flown at wolves, deer, and other
large prey. Barnes witnessed Atlanta killing a deer in Kirghiz,
and Chalsan told him of her killing a black wolf a season
earlier. Mongols and other nomads raise wheep and goats, and
obviously have no love for wolves. A wolf might be little more
than a day at the office for Atlanta with her 11" talons,
however, a wolf is a major-league deal for an average sized
Berkut at 15 - 20 lbs. Chalsan explained that wolves
occasionally win these battles, and that he had once seen a wolf
kill three of the birds before the fourth killed him. Quite
obviously, there would be an advantage to having the birds be
bigger, i.e. to having the average berkut be 25 lbs, and a big
one be 40 or 50.
It has never been done, however, despite all of the efforts
since the days of Chengis Khan. We have Chengis Khan's famous
"What is best in life..." quote, and the typical mongol reply
from one of his captains involved falconry. They regarded it as
important. Chengis Khan, Oktai, Kuyuk, Hulagu, Batui, Monke,
Kubilai et. al. were all into this sport big time, they all
wanted these birds big, since they flew them at everything from
wolves and deer (a big berkut like Atlanta can drive its talons
in around a wolf's spine and snap it) to leopards and tigers,
and there was no lack of funds for the breeding program
involved. Chengis Khan did not suffer from poverty.
Moreover, the breeding of berkuts has continued apace from that
day to this, including a 200 year stretch during which those
people ruled almost all of the world which you'd care to own at
the time, and they never got them any bigger than 25 lbs or so.
Remember Desmond's words regarding the difficulty which
increasingly larger birds will experience getting airborne from
flat ground? Atlanta was powerful enough in flight, but she was
not easily able to take off from flat ground. Barnes noted one
instance in which a town crank attacked Atlanta with a cane and
the great bird had to frantically run until it found a sand dune
from which to launch herself. This could mean disaster in the
wild. A bird of prey will often come to ground with prey, and
if she can't take off from flat ground to avoid trouble once in
awhile... it would only take once. Khan Chalsan had explained
the necessity of having the birds in captivity for certain
periods, and nesting wild at other times. A bird bigger than
Atlanta would not survive the other times.
One variety of pteratorn, however, judging from pictures which
have appeared in Science Magazine, was very nearly a scaled-up
golden eagle weighing 170 lbs or so, with a wingspan of 27' as
compared to Atlanta's 10. In our world, that can't happen.
Predators too Large to Sustain Falls
A fourth category of evidence derives from a careful analysis of
antediluvian predators. It is well known that elephant-sized
animals cannot sustain falls, and that elephants spend their
entire lives avoiding them. For an elephant, the slightest
tumble can break bones and/or destroy enough tissue to prove
fatal. Predators, however, live by tackling and tumbling with
prey. One might think that this consideration would preclude
the existence of any predator too large to sustain falls; weight
estimates for the tyrannosaurs, however, include specimens
heavier than any elephant. That appears to be a contradiction.
Assorted Other Evidence
There are other varieties of this sort of evidence. For
instance, elephants are too heavy to run in our world; as is
well known, they manage a kind of a fast walk, at least one foot
always on the ground. They cannot jump, and anything resembling
a gully stops them cold. Mammoths were as big and bigger than
the largest elephants, however, and pliestocene art clearly
shows them galloping.
One final example: the January 1993 issue of "Discover"
magazine carries a picture of the Utahraptor, a 20', 1500 lb
version of a velociraptor recently found in Utah. The creature
apparently ran on the balls of its two hind feet, on two toes in
fact, the third toe carrying a 12" claw for disembowling prey.
A very active lifestyle is indicated in fact. Very few
predators appear to be built for attacking prey notably larger
than themselves; the utahraptor appears to be such a case.
In our world, of course, 1500 lb toe dancers do not exist. The
only example we have of a 1500 lb land predator is the Kodiak
bear, the lumbering gait and mannerisms of which are familiar to
us all. And so, over and over again, this same kind of dilemma,
things which can't happen in our world being the norm in the
antediluvian world. The Saturn Myth and attenuated perceived
gravity are the only explainations which really work.
E-Mail Fredric L. Rice / The Skeptic Tank