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How the World Will End
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Some Pertinent Parables
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Perspective on Myth
Questions Better than Answers
The Road to Saturn Thesis
Sacred Writings
Sex Bias in Medicine Practice
Spiritual versus Material
Symbolism of Human Body
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Site note: Since the publication of this
groundbreaking article, the "Saturn Myth" has been supported by significant
"concrete" evidence garnered by the space and solar system explorations by
modern science. The whole Saturnian Reconstruction has also been fleshed out by
contributions from almost all of the academic disciplines
Megafauna and Present Weight/Size Limits
Copyright 1991-1994 Ted Holden
Most of the evidence being presented in support of the Saturn Myth
concept is either historical and heavily dependent upon
interpretations of mythological and classical themes.
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?
Lynn Rose's analysis of what it would actually take to produce the former
super-continent (Pangaea) provides one such piece of evidence in
startling fashion.
Moreover, 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.
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 independent
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 vertebrates, but for many other
organisms, including at least some, but not all
invertebrates."
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, or had better "leverage". Superposed
images of sauropods and powerlifters at roughly
equal-weight sizes show the sauropod's legs to be puny compared to the
human athletes', as one would expect, since the sauropod's
body was mostly digestive system, the humans's mostly muscle.
The better-leverage argument would require the sauropod to be a
spectacularly knob-kneed sort of a creature whose knees and other
joints were wider than those of the human athletes, even though
the rest of their legs were spindly by contrast with the
humans. A quick look at the pictures dispels this.
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, 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 lb. on a
bar, assuming he was fully warmed up.
Standing Up
at 70,000 lb.
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 lb., the weight commonly
given for the brontosaur. Kazmaier's maximum effort at standing,
fully warmed up, assuming the 1000 lb. squat, was 1340 lb. (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 lb. 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 lb.. 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 lb.. 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 lb.!
Moreover,
Kazmaier is using glutteal and lower back muscles in the squat,
and pectorals in the benchpress, i.e. extra muscle groups
which the sauropod he is being compared to would not be assisted by
in standing. Any tiny advantage in leverage which a sauropod
might have over the human lifter for any reason, would be
overwhelmed by the huge edge in available musculature and the usage of
the extra muscle groups on the part of the human in the comparison.
To believe
then, that a brontosaur could stand at 70,000 lb., 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 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 lb.?
The answer is simply the solution to:
1340/340.667 = x/x.667
or just
under 21,000 lb.. 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 lb., and Roger L.
DiSilvestro, "The African Elephant", Audobon Society 1991 notes on page 69
that the gigantic bush elephant on display at the Smithsonian
Institute Museum of Natural History is the largest known
specimin at around 12000 lbs., 13' 2" tall.
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
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 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 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."
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. Try holding
your arm out horizontally for more than a minute or two, and
then imagine your arm being 40' long and 30,000 lb......
Past some
point in weight, an animal's skeletal structure must serve
mainly as a mechanism for bearing the weight, thus an elephant's
skeletal system will be seen to resemble Roman
architecture, the legs serving as columns, the spine arched upwards
like a Roman arch, e.g. "Elephants". 1992, ISBN
0-87596-143-6, page 78. Juxtaposition, however, shows a sauropod's
neck to be several times the mass of a large elephant,
and the sauropod's necks which are shown held out
horizontally or nearly so (the diplodocid family), arch the wrong way.
Something is seriously amiss here.
An
ultrasaur or seismosaur with a neck 40' - 60' long and weighing
25000 - 40000 lb., 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 hold their heads up, and they
couldn't hold them out either. That doesn't leave much.
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 skies which
no longer permit flying creatures above 30 lb. or so. Modern
birds of prey (the Argentinean teratorn) weighing 170 -200 lb.
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 lb. 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 lb. or so flies anymore, and those creatures,
albatrosses and a few of the largest condors and eagles, are
marginal. Albatrosses in particular are called "gooney
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 Mesozoic 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 lb. of flight muscles as
efficient as those in humming birds. But it had reduced its
musculature to about 8 lb., 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 lb. 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 lb. 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 takeoff 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 lb. or so; no possibility of flapping the wings
for instance. The giant teratorn 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
terotorn 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
maneuver 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 lb.: 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 lb. 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 lb. Similarly,
my calculations say that about 20000 lb. 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 takeoff
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, takeoff
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 lb. 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 were 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 teratorn? 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
lb. 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 sheep 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 lb.. 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 lb., 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 lb. 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 teratorn, however, judging from pictures which have
appeared in the December 1980 issue of "Bioscience" magazine,
was very nearly a scaled-up golden eagle weighing 170 lb. or so,
with a wingspan of 25' as compared to Atlanta's 10. In our
world, that can't happen.
And so,
over and over again, we see essentially the same dilemma;
things being the norm in the antediluvian world which cannot
happen now at all. The only possible solution is the Saturn
hypothesis and attenuated gravity. |