Brian J. Ford - Too Big to Walk

It took centuries before the strange fossilized remains found centuries ago on a beach, or dug out by quarrymen, were recognized for what they were. Yet I believe that the view of dinosaurs which those investigators bequeathed to us is wrong. I am going to demonstrate that the conventional conception of those gargantuan monsters pounding across the prairie, fighting like demons and roaring like banshees, is completely fanciful. I am going to show that the theory of birds as dinosaurs is not a new idea at all (it was first proposed in 1888), and I will show that it is absurd. There are animals very close to dinosaurs in our modern world, but they aren’t anything like birds, any more than a chihuahua is a kind of kitten. You have been told so many times that an asteroid or a meteorite was the cause of the dinosaurs becoming extinct, but we will discover that even this is wrong. That can never have been the case. If so, then all other reptiles – the crocodiles and tortoises, lizards and alligators, turtles and snakes – would have vanished at the same time.

In this book we will see how the names of dinosaurs were derived, and discover something of the times in which they lived. I have set down imperial and metric measurements, though have used ‘ton’ throughout. The ton, short ton and metric ton (or tonne) are all within 10 per cent of each other, and all the estimates of the weight of dinosaurs are approximate, some wildly so; therefore sticking to the single unit is sensible.

Why did I not wish to publish these investigations? My assumption was that some sensible palæontologist, somewhere, would draw the same conclusions; yet they didn’t. It was only when the global community of palæontologists advised on a series of updated television documentaries perpetuating these myths that I finally felt the time had come to say so. Even then I held back and delayed publishing anything. In the event, I announced my own alternative conclusions in a modest magazine article, only to find all my research universally condemned by the entire world of dinosaur palæontology. So, can an individual single voice revolutionize an entire modern scientific discipline? Could one person, in this modern world, challenge a major branch of science and show that all its protagonists are mistaken? Can a single scientist, in any field, still show that everybody else is wrong?

You tell me.

You cannot escape from dinosaurs. They are everywhere; indeed, you are probably sitting on top of one as you read these words. Fossil dinosaurs are abundant wherever there are Mesozoic sedimentary rocks, and they occur in every continent, even the Antarctic. Everywhere there are books, games, movies and television documentaries; since Sheryl Leach created Barney the Dinosaur in 1992, it has become one of the most famous (or notorious) new cartoon characters, and you can wade through pages of dinosaur toys online. For ten dollars, you can pick up a frightening pair of foam rubber dinosaur claws that, assuming you do not have relatives of a nervous disposition, you may wear like gloves. Dinosaurs dominate the media; indeed, the first popular cartoon character in the history of movies was a dinosaur. It was not Mickey Mouse (who began life as Mortimer), or Betty Boop, or even Felix the Cat. They were all released in the 1920s and 1930s, whereas a dinosaur named Gertie had become the world’s first famous cartoon character in a film that was released before World War I. Gertie was a smiling, endearing sauropod, created by Winsor McCay who had enrolled to study art in Chicago in 1899. He released his movie Gertie the Dinosaur at the Palace Theater, Chicago, on February 8, 1914, and soon it became a nationwide hit. His cartoon character had been drawn from the skeleton of a brontosaur in the American Museum of Natural History (A.M.N.H). I have lectured in that historic venue and have seen those dramatic dinosaur displays. Truly, they are awesome. Gertie was portrayed with vivid realism, with her tail resting on the ground and dragging along behind her, just as you’d expect, much like a present-day crocodile.

A dinosaur named Gertie was the world’s first popular cartoon character, launched in 1914 by Winsor McCay of Chicago. The backgrounds were drawn by John A. Fitzsimmons, and McCay based the dinosaur on popular accounts of a Brontosaurus .

More recently we have seen those stunning digital re-creations in the Jurassic Park movies, where huge sauropod dinosaurs rear up for leaves, standing on their huge hindlegs, then hit the ground with their forelimbs to create an earth-shattering crunch. Disney even released a film about a friendly dinosaur, which had facial musculature unlike that of any reptile and which made doe-eyed expressions of maternal devotion as she smiled affectionately at her young. On television, we have become accustomed to dinosaurs throwing up clouds of dust as they pound across the arid scrub, we have seen a planet populated by dinosaurs, and have watched people walking with them. Yet these are all wrong. The evolution of dinosaurs has been misconstrued. In this book, we will take a new look at the latest evidence about dinosaurs and find that they were very different from everything that you have been told before.

Conventional portrayals of herbivorous dinosaurs show them in a familiar modern landscape, usually in a landscape of desert or scrub. Scientific evidence shows this cannot be the case: they consumed huge amounts of lush vegetation. (http://wallpoper.com/wallpaper/dinosaurs-desert-400302)

The standard books will tell you that the study of dinosaurs began when Sir Richard Owen coined the term in 1842, but dinosaurs were actually discovered thousands of years before that. They even feature in rituals that date back to prehistoric times, and their fossils have been known to scientists for centuries. Although palæontology first became popular in Queen Victoria’s England, more than 1,000 different fossil species had already been identified when she was still a young monarch, long before the word ‘dinosaur’ had even been coined. When the pioneering dinosaur hunters appeared, some were daredevil characters (one of whom is said to have inspired the character of Indiana Jones), others were quiet and modest geologists who hated writing about their discoveries, along with crazy extroverts, thieves and saboteurs, plagiarists and commercial speculators who smuggled skeletons and became wealthy. Many are fantasists, given to wild speculation without a shred of scientific evidence to back it. Since the 1970s dinosaurs have been a hot topic of discussion, and as we shall see, new species are constantly being named. Today, fresh dinosaur sites are being discovered all around the world and we have recorded a total of some 1,850 genera of dinosaurs that lived between 245 and 66 million years ago. Where did this all start? How did we become aware that the Earth had changed – and when did people realize the true nature of fossils?

Palæontologists will tell you that China is a new hotbed of dinosaur discoveries. Research is continually revealing fresh information, and strange unheard-of dinosaurs are being recorded. Of course, this is true; but it is not as new as people say. The Chinese have known about dinosaurs since the Stone Age. The fossilized skeletons were taken as the remains of gigantic monsters, and it is those that gave rise to the legendary depictions of dragons. Dragons were real – they were dinosaurs. Chinese medicine believes in the administration of tinctures from fearsome creatures to heal and invigorate humans. Thus, just as the bones of present-day predators – like brown bears and tigers – have been used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine, so have the bones of mighty dinosaurs. The Chinese for dinosaur is kǒnglóng (恐龍), meaning ‘terrible dragon’, and their existence was written about by Hua Yang Guo Zhi in the Western Jin Dynasty (AD 265–316). Since the fossil remains of dinosaurs showed that they were the most powerful of all creatures, their bones would logically provide the strongest cure. The tradition persists to this day, and many village communities still regard dinosaur skeletons as the remains of real dragons. Reporter Kevin Holden Platt writes that, during a recent palæontological dig in Henan Province headed by Dong Zhiming of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, Dong told of villagers who were said to be using dragon bones in their homeopathic medicines. When he investigated, he found that the bones they were using were the petrified remains of gigantic sauropod dinosaurs. The tinctures were used to treat dizziness and cramp, and were also applied to help wounds heal.1