A Grouped Bunch of Tweet messages on Dinosaur Size
In my quest to understand the dino size issue, I naively, thought that it could be explained by simple physics.
If Dino's lived on an earth that was smaller, spinning faster, they would feel less effective weight and be able to grow larger. What if the KT boundary represented evidence of a colossal impact, - leaving the earth larger and slowing its rotation. if you make these two assumptions, then a lot of other things fall into place. A faster spinning earth, would mean a higher average temperature with less temperature fluctuation between night and day. Since in our assumptions we are kicking the shit out of the planet, why not get rid of the Earth’s tilting axis. There you go - no seasons. Voila, you have a planet ready to be dominated by huge ectothermic monsters in a belt around the Equator.. And with small endothermic animals hiding in places the sauropods can’t go - cold, dark and toward the poles of the planet. After the impact, the sauropods that survive, die because of their weight or die because their bodies cannot adjust to the wider temperature swings. The surviving mammals can come out of their cold caves and move into a land where the terrible lizards exist only in dreams.
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