Mass Extinctions

From studying fossil records, two things become clear. First and foremost of these is that Earth is periodically hit by mass extinction events that wipe out a large percentage of animal and plant species.

Secondly, it is clear that the maximum size of animals and plants has become smaller over time. We do not have brontosaurus size animals roaming our forests, nor do we have ferns the size of palm trees.

There is no controversy in this. The data is clear. However, there is plenty of controversy as to the true nature of the mass extinctions and what exactly is behind the steady decline of the maximum size of animals.

Some think that mass extinctions happen virtually over night, while others believe them to have taken as much as a million years to complete.

The decline in maximum size of animals is usually attributed to anything but gravity, which for some reason is assumed to be a constant. However, the most obvious and immediate answer to why there are no brontosaurus size animals on our planet today is that gravity must have increased.

My personal conclusion is that mass extinctions happen in a series of rapid steps, and that an increase in gravity prevents the surviving species from producing animals and plants as large as the was previously possible.

Were anyone to resurrect the Quetzalcoatlus (a flying dinosaur the size of a giraffe) today, the poor thing would not survive for long. It would not fly. It would hardly be able to move. Long before reaching adulthood, the animal would succumb to gravity.

The sudden disappearance of the Woolly Mammoth, Sabre Tiger and other large animals some 10000 years ago is proof that extinctions are rapid when they happen. However, recent extinction events have not all happened at once. The Elephant Bird on Madagascar died out as recently as in the 17th century. The Haast Eagle and the Moa on New Zealand died out in the 14th century, and there were Woolly Mammoths still in existence 4000 years ago.

In the space of some 10000 years, a large number of species have disappeared. In geological time, this is but a wink of the eye, and so we can conclude that we are in fact living in the middle of an extinction event comparable to the two big ones that happened earlier.

There is no reason to believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs some 60 million years ago was any more dramatic than the extinction event that we are presently in. Nor is there any reason to suspect that the really big extinction event that happened some 300 million years ago was all that dramatic either, despite wiping out as much as 90 percent of all animals then living.

However, we will not speculate as to the exact nature of the extinction events. The focus of this book is not to settle any discussion on this, but to look closer at the extinction events to see what we might learn from them regarding gravity.

In that respect, it is of particular interest to note that it was not first and foremost the size of the animals some 300 years ago that differed from the animals that disappeared some 60 million years ago. It was their general size and type that differed. That's where the biggest difference lay.

300 million years ago, Earth was dominated by giant insects and lizards. There were ferns the size of trees. In the seas, there were armored sharks and fishes of all kinds.

60 million years ago, this was greatly reduced. Insects were smaller, and so were the lizards. Armored sea animals had become relatively rare.

The large animals that went extinct some 60 million years ago were different in kind from the ones that went extinct 300 million years ago. Dinosaurs were not lizards. They did not crawl with their legs out to the side. Their legs pointed down like all large land animals today. They were most likely hot blooded too, related to present day birds.

However, even the animals from 60 million years ago had features that we do not find today. Only the kangaroo has a tail as bulky as that of dinosaurs. Giraffes and elephants have tiny tails. No large animal has a massive heads relative to its body comparable to that of the Tyrannosaurus Rex or the Quetzalcoatlus. The long neck of the giraffe is nowhere as swan-like and elegant as that of a brontosaurus.

It appears that more than one thing has changed over the years. Not only has gravity increased, buoyancy and inertia has increased too.

Insects today are some 5 times smaller than they were 300 million years ago and much fewer sea animals capable of swimming carry armor. This can be attributed to a change in buoyancy of both air and water. The relatively large size of heads and tails of the dinosaurs can be attributed to a change in inertia, while the overall change in size is due to a change in gravity.

The fact that gravity, inertia and buoyancy have all changed tells us that it is not just our planet that has changed. Everything on it has changed too. We do not merely live on a planet that has become more massive, the very stuff we are made of has increased in mass too. It is the proton that has changed over time. Atoms today are heavier than they were in the past.