Re: psychoceramics: Megafauna and attenuated gravity

[acb @ zikzak.net (Andrew C. Bulhak)]

[Andrew Davie]
> 
> This gentleman attempts to argue that the gravity on earth was much less
> than today, and cites the existence of dinosaurs as proof.
> 
> Perhaps he isn't a full-blown kook, but i've taken vertebrate biology and
> evolution classes, and i've _never_ heard that dinosaurs were an
> impossibility under "normal" gravity.  If that were the case, believe me,
> we would devote a considerable amount of our time discussing this!
> 
> The fact that he has written so MUCH on this, also supports that he may be
> a fanatic.
> 
> http://www.access.digex.net/~medved/biganims.html

I believe medved is Ted Holden, a Velikovskian and perennial kook, who
has advocated quite a few bizarre ideas in the past.  He was mentioned
in a USENET kook who's-who some years ago.

The quoted text below, with its mention of Saturn, sounds suggestive
of Velikovskian Catastrophism.

 -- acb

> ----first two paragraphs---
> It is a fairly easy demonstration that nothing any larger than the largest
> elephants could live in our world today, and that the largest dinosaurs
> survived ONLY because the nature of the world and of the solar system was
> then such that they did not experience gravity as we do at all; they'd be
> crushed by their own weight, collapse in a heap, and suffocate within
> minutes were they to.
> 
> This has serious implications for cosmology, since the Saturn system
> hypothesis being advanced by David Talbott and Ev Cochrane is the only
> theoretical basis which even gets started towards explaining how such a
> state of affairs as reduced perceived gravity on land might ever have
> pertained. Astronomers in particular, of course, are less than thrilled.
> ----end text---