Why were dinosaurs so large?

[HydrogenBond]

The question I would like to ask is, why were dinosaurs so large and why did they move to small? I ask this, not in terms of the hows of bio-chemistry, but more in terms of a practical reason?

 

One explanation, is connected to the evolution of the sensory systems and consciousness. A huge stinky dinosaur, would be easier to see, smell and find, even if dinosaur consciousness to vision was not good, and their conscious sense of smell, limited. This is not to say their sensory system may not have been good, but the broadcast may not have fully registered to their consciousness. A HD camera, using, a low definition monitor will not show HD, but will show LD.

 

The large size and the large sensory footprints of dinosaurs, may have been needed for early sensory evolutionary R&D in terms of how it displays on low definition conscious monitors. As the sensory-conscious train evolved, animals would be able to consciously register smaller and smaller stimulus. The larger sensory output, of a huge dinosaur, would then throw the more HD system off scale, with the higher D animal needing to separate to get back on scale. It is like if you had a geiger counter, set to ambient background, and then go into a reactor room. It is now off scale, making it harder to getdata. You will need to move away to get back on scale.

 

Higher level sensory awareness means the ability to sense smaller and smaller levels of stimulus (on scale). That means smaller and smaller sources of output, such as from more subtle and even smaller food, making smaller and smaller animals better able to survive with the upgrade. If your vision is set to 1 cm (on scale), you might eat berries. Apples might be too big while ants too small (off scale). If we advance the vision to the 1 mm scale, which is sensory progressive, ants now start to look good, but this will put you on a diet.

 

The huge dinosaurs would gradually get phased out, as the LD conscious monitor was able to move toward HD. instead of only seeing mountains on the LD screen, now we can see the trees. The sharper sensory animals will be able to slip under the radar of the larger poor sensory animals (under their sensory scaling), and finish the job before being detected. They could also sense the huge pile of noisy stink, at much greater distances, to get there first.

 

The most advanced HD tools in physics are very sensitive and are concerned with things that are very small or very far and faint. This tiny stimulus gives a lot of food for thought, and makes models of matter base on the tiny. But these need extreme HD or we would only be able to see bigger and closer, with faint under the radar.

[Moontanman]

First HB, not all or even most dinosaurs were especially large. Most fell in the range of large mammals of today for pretty much the same reasons. large herbivorous animal can eat more and allow it to ferment in it's stomach. Dinosaurs were bio-mechanically better suited to really huge sizes than mammals that is why a very few of them became very large, simply because they could and bigger was an advantage. a very large animal can keep it's metabolism going easier than a small animal. this was also a factor. The reason for the larger predators was to be able to deal with the larger prey. Dinosaurs were bio-mechanically better at being bigger than mammals but before the advent of humans mammals were also getting larger, as in

 

Paraceratherium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Different weight estimates vary greatly, but most realistic and reliable weight estimates are from over 10 up to about 20 (metric) tons.[citation needed]. This puts it in the weight range of some medium sized sauropod dinosaurs.

 

it should also be noted that mammals had specialized in being small to get out of the way of dinosaurs. this predisposition to being small made it more difficult for mammals to grow in to larger animals after the disappearance of he dinosaurs. mammals have only had free rein to develop large bodies for about 1/3 the time dinosaurs did and the most recent mammals are very large, as large as many dinosaurs were.

[Boerseun]

Mostly like Moontan said above.

 

The range of dinosaur sizes were very much comparable with the size range of modern day mammals in the same niches. Although as far as megaherbivores are concerned, we are stuck with elephants - and for the very same reason. The food they eat are very low in nourishment, and whereas humans cook their food to break the cell structures down to get to the nourishment inside, elephants convert their bodies into gigantic fermentation vats, where the branches and leaves they graze on are broken down by bacteria in their stomachs. This still only realizes very little nutrients, and the solution to that is to be really big and eat lots and lots of food.

 

Size, however, isn't the only solution to extracting nutrients from low-grade plant material. Rabbits have solved this problem by eating their own excrement, basically digesting the same mouthful twice, and ruminants like cows "chew the cud". We can speculate that there were dinosaurs that employed the same strategies, and stayed relatively small.

 

Another factor that influenced their dimensions, would be the nature of the forests in which they lived. Today, we have giraffes, who might seem to be on the way to evolve to diplodocus-like dimensions, what with their elongated necks. But the chances of them getting any taller is remote - they are limited by the height of the trees on the savannah, and growing any taller won't benefit them. In the age of the dinosaurs, there were some really tall forests - in which case it profited diplodocus to reach their level.

[HydrogenBond]

If a dinosaur couldn't digest food efficiently, they will need to eat extra food to get the necessary food value. If this instinctive feeding routine gets conditioned to the large food input requirement, and the body was to evolve higher level digestive efficiency, they will grow bigger. Now they may be eating the equivalent of double food, for example, simply by doing the same instinctive things.

 

Bigger might then mean maintaining body proportions, forming larger sensory systems. Although bigger sensory systems, like softball sized eyes, may not change things, it might nevertheless increase the bulk sensory currents that flow into their little brains and help extend the wiring for consciousness. As consciousness of higher sensory resolution evolves, for the brain to take advantage of this better sensory scale, consciousness will begin to downsize points of interest (smaller implies higher resolution).

 

For example, instead of eating the entire bush, like before, they might become conscious of the red berries. Behavior begins to pick primarily the berries, eating less,, getting smaller. The higher resolution for on-scale, might also mean the need to evolve improved behavior, due to the body becoming hungry more often, due to the diet change. It needs to figure out how to get more berries quicker to gain selective advantage. The result is a trend to smaller but more intelligent critters, which then stabilize.

 

Humans add a very interesting twist. Humans not only use real time sensory data, but can organize the memories of previous sensory data, within the imagination, even with the sensory systems semi-detached. For example, if a dog was tracking an animal, it will use its sense of smell, for example, to follow the trail. Humans can't do this. instead we might look at the foot prints, then use the imagination to remember what we have learned of this animal's behavior, and extrapolate the data to where it may be heading. The imagination allows a detachment from continuous sensory requirement.

 

What would have made this human skill develop, as a necessity, would be if the sensory systems began to degrade. One can take any human sensory system and find animals with higher resolution. If human had evolved the highest resolution sensory systems, there may not have been any practical need for the imagination. With extreme sensory systems, when tracking the animal, humans might be able to smell it and hear it rustling in the bushes a kilometer away. Or we could climb a tree and see the tick on its back. But we can't do that. Humans need to use the imagination to visualize these things in the context of previous memories. The lion can smell the humans and crawls in for the attach. Humans can't see him until it is too late, but remember this lion only hunts around sunset, as sets up a fortification, so they can react when the lion is closer and on-scale.

[Getting A Life]

The need to eat large quantities of food would create the need for a large stomach and framework to support it. Random mutations in reptiles would favour size in this instance. It can't all be explained genetically however, the oxygen debt in a body the size of a brontosaurus would have been enormous. But oxygen levels were higher which made it easier for giant animals to come about. I suspect CO2 was higher as well leading to the giant forests of the time, these would have contributed nicely to the elevated oxygen levels.

 

Perhaps the largest dinosaurs died off when fires took out major forests, in high oxygen they'd go up like tinder, and the loss of forest areas resulted in less oxygen and certain dinosaurs were just too big to cope with this. B)

[kreativkorner]

I feel bad about my reasoning based on the forum in that one would look for an answer based in science, but I got my BS in Philosophy... you know the study that created science. Anyway, there is a creator, a watchmaker if you will and I don't know if It is Good or Bad or any of that jazz, but it likes complexity. Paley proved this with his philosophy on the ultimate watchmaker. If you think of how complex the human eye, or a dinosaur eye actually is, and compare it to that of a watch, and you know that watches don't just wash up on the beach, something is pushing this place in a direction that is made for complexity.

Accordingly, this ultimate watchmaker needed practice, and lots of it. 65 million years to be exact, to perfect us. We are the creators masterpiece, and we are very similar to it, or more similar to it than any other creatures. The energy that created us wanted a context for us to "play" in, you know create societies, and the internet, and control several forms of energy. The huge dinosaurs also helped create fossil fuels from their carcusses to animate this short span of pleasure that the creator is getting from watching us and moving us toward evolution. A couple million people die here and a couple million make incredible discoveries over there and the entity is laughin it up, knowin' that the humans the energy created is mostly good (or maybe it really doesn't care). All in all we change the landscape at lightening paces, just think how far America has come in just the last 50 years. It's like our creator set up 65 million years worth of dominoes being the dinosaurs all so she could watch them fall in splendor as they cascade off of each other in a spectacular marvel for this high energy force. This is just an analogy though so don't take the dominoe thing too seriously, we're definitely not just falling into place as destiny would plan, this place is a struggle. May the fittest survive.

[Moontanman]

I feel bad about my reasoning based on the forum in that one would look for an answer based in science, but I got my BS in Philosophy... you know the study that created science. Anyway, there is a creator, a watchmaker if you will and I don't know if It is Good or Bad or any of that jazz, but it likes complexity. Paley proved this with his philosophy on the ultimate watchmaker. If you think of how complex the human eye, or a dinosaur eye actually is, and compare it to that of a watch, and you know that watches don't just wash up on the beach, something is pushing this place in a direction that is made for complexity.

Accordingly, this ultimate watchmaker needed practice, and lots of it. 65 million years to be exact, to perfect us. We are the creators masterpiece, and we are very similar to it, or more similar to it than any other creatures. The energy that created us wanted a context for us to "play" in, you know create societies, and the internet, and control several forms of energy. The huge dinosaurs also helped create fossil fuels from their carcusses to animate this short span of pleasure that the creator is getting from watching us and moving us toward evolution. A couple million people die here and a couple million make incredible discoveries over there and the entity is laughin it up, knowin' that the humans the energy created is mostly good (or maybe it really doesn't care). All in all we change the landscape at lightening paces, just think how far America has come in just the last 50 years. It's like our creator set up 65 million years worth of dominoes being the dinosaurs all so she could watch them fall in splendor as they cascade off of each other in a spectacular marvel for this high energy force. This is just an analogy though so don't take the dominoe thing too seriously, we're definitely not just falling into place as destiny would plan, this place is a struggle. May the fittest survive.

 

Everything you claim has been refuted many times over on this forum, do you have any evidence to back up your claims or even anything new to add to the discussion?

[kreativkorner]

First HB, not all or even most dinosaurs were especially large. Most fell in the range of large mammals of today for pretty much the same reasons. large herbivorous animal can eat more and allow it to ferment in it's stomach. Dinosaurs were bio-mechanically better suited to really huge sizes than mammals that is why a very few of them became very large, simply because they could and bigger was an advantage. a very large animal can keep it's metabolism going easier than a small animal. this was also a factor. The reason for the larger predators was to be able to deal with the larger prey. Dinosaurs were bio-mechanically better at being bigger than mammals but before the advent of humans mammals were also getting larger, as in

 

Paraceratherium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

 

it should also be noted that mammals had specialized in being small to get out of the way of dinosaurs. this predisposition to being small made it more difficult for mammals to grow in to larger animals after the disappearance of he dinosaurs. mammals have only had free rein to develop large bodies for about 1/3 the time dinosaurs did and the most recent mammals are very large, as large as many dinosaurs were.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I thought my claims were obvious! Sorry for not backing up my beliefs with the solid facts. First claim:

 

Dinosaurs were put here by an energy force that used them as practice to create us, because of the irreducible complexity of the human eye and the dinosaur eye for that matter.

 

The human eye captures, delivers, and interprets 1.5 pulse messages a millisecond. It would take dozens of Cray supercomputers working simultaneously and perfectly together to achieve such a feat. Prehistoric animals like the trilobite had complex eyes as well, but not as complex. The entity had to work it's way up to get to us. Look how huge the first computers were! It's like the entity finally created the microchip.

 

CREATIONIST SPAM REMOVED BY THE MOTHER OF ALL COWS

 

The fossil fuel claim:

 

I'm having trouble getting information to back this one up, a lot of information points to oil, and natural gas and the like coming from plants and animals that existed even before the dinosaurs. Yet the dinosaurs still did contribute and though coal and oil seem to be becoming our demise now, they helped mankind evolve into this thing that is getting closere to it's creator...You know something getting killed over there, something being discovered over there, but all in all striving for interesting things and complexity.

 

Basically my argument is that there is an energy force pushing evolution and that is why the dinosaurs are so large. As one of the steps in connecting our small lenses to a gigantic cortex involved the creator learning how to connect gigantic eyes to a tiny brain, just as we had to invent huge inneficient computers before we discovered how to create laptops.

[Boerseun]

You have picked the wrong forum to push the Creationist agenda, mate. Please do a search for the kinda things you have in mind, but don't reply to them, because your questions have been answered and your claims rebuked. Read the posts, concentrate, try and understand, read it again, and eventually the claims made by your pastor Sunday morning will sound more and more unlikely.

 

Because Creationism is hokum.

 

Please don't try to hijack this thread for that particular agenda. It's just wrong.

 

...and no, we're not "afraid" to discuss it, we're just tired of explaining the same idiotic points over and over again.

 

Right. As you were...

[sman]

Paley proved this with his philosophy on the ultimate watchmaker. If you think of how complex the human eye, or a dinosaur eye actually is, and compare it to that of a watch, and you know that watches don't just wash up on the beach.....

 

 

You're right. Eyes do not just wash up on the shore. The features of life are fabulously complex and require a special kind of explantion that is not provided by chemistry and physics. They do have more in common with man-made artifacts than they do with rocks or weather or solar systems.

 

An explanation was provided by Charls Darwin in 1859. Eyes emerge over eons from an automatic process that really can be explained in the terms of chemistry and physics. Wiliam Paley's postulation of an Ultimate Watchmaker was answered repleately, yet delicately, by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker. Are you allowed to read a book like this? I hope so, because anyone with opposing ideas to Darwinism (which are welcom by science) would do well to farmiliarize themselves with the enormouse body of evidence that supports it.

 

:hihi::):singer:

 

I think forum members and moderators can be easily forgiven for being weary of repeatedly answering the same fallacious creationist arguments over and over again as the success rate for this sort of thing is hampered by a huge barrier. That being said, I think Hypography is an appropriate place for creationists to post their ideas. There are creationist forums in which everyone agrees with these arguments. Creationists arguments posted here are not seeking affirmation, but rathur, I have to assume, the kind of skeptical scrutiny that fuels science. If we do not have the energy for these discussions, the best advice I can think of is simply not to reply.

[kreativkorner]

How did dinosaurs grow so big?

 

Were Dinosaurs Warm-Blooded?

 

Why Were Dinosaurs So Big? Explaining the Size of Ancient Dinosaurs

 

During the time of the dinosaurs the vegetation was probably robust as it was a warmer environment with a higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This caused a lot of vegetation, tons of vegetation, a googol pound of vegetation perhaps. Before this thesis it’s also important to note that dinosaurs were not all giants, as creation.com actually says that the average dinosaur size was comparable to the size of a sheep. I therefore, believe the question to be answered should be, “Why were some dinosaurs so big?” So that’s what I will attempt to answer.

The huge dinosaurs, you know, the 50-70 ton creatures were most likely more reptile-like and that’s why they could grow so large. They ate mass amounts of vegetation, and were so big that their bigness was actually the defense that kept them from being attacked. Reptiles have the ability to grow their entire life span, unlike mammals and other warm blooded animals, that typically have a growth spurt which stops in maturity. This source was cited from the T.V. series, “Walking With Dinosaurs, which said that the huge size of Liopleurodon meant it must have been over 100 years old.

Plant Eaters Diplodicus and Brachiosaurus weighed over 50 tons to the T-Rex’s trim 7-8 tons at maturity. I’m under the impression that T-Rex may have just been a huge scavenger who fed off the carcasses of 100 year old plant eaters. I’m also under the impression that T-Rex was therefore also lizard-like, however less so than the huge vegetarians mentioned.

Currently there are no warm blooded mammals on earth that could possibly grow to 70 tons, metabolizing tons of vegetation, especially in an already hot environment without quickly overheating itself to death.

T-Rex was probably not just as a bird, and that’s why he was so large! It could move faster than the giant vegetation eating, ectothermic, heat absorbing animals, but not as fast as in the movie Jurassic park, chasing down a jeep. It’s muscle mass would have to be twice as big as it’s actual size to carry it’s weight…impossible. It was probably a 6 ton homeothermic animal regulating a somewhat constant body temperature, and yet also ectothermic, or absorbing heat from its environment. The fact of the matter is that the big ones were most likely cold-blooded vegetarian monsters, who shared homeothermic-ness as something in common with our modern day warm blooded animals as since they were so huge back then that they could maintain that body temperature even when it cooled down or got warmer simply because their bodies would take so long to cool down or heat up with their huge size. So these animals ate, and moved the right way to stay the right temperature internally and then ate again and ate again, because they could undaunted. In conclusion, dinosaurs grew so big, because they could.

[Turtle]

How did dinosaurs grow so big?

 

 

During the time of the dinosaurs the vegetation was probably robust as it was a warmer environment with a higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This caused a lot of vegetation, tons of vegetation, a googol pound of vegetation perhaps. Before this thesis it’s also important to note that dinosaurs were not all giants, as creation.com actually says that the average dinosaur size was comparable to the size of a sheep. I therefore, believe the question to be answered should be, “Why were some dinosaurs so big?” So that’s what I will attempt to answer. ...

 

creation.com!??? what a load of dino pucky. either provide reliable sources or don't post. this religious crap is not science and pointedly against our rules. :hihi: you wanna foist this nonsense on folks, create your own web site for it. :singer:

[Qfwfq]

It might be helpful to keep in mind that the the word dinosaur was coined by Richard Owen to mean "terribly large reptile" although many paleontological species of reptile have been called by the same term. In many of these cases it is still considered incorrect terminology though there are some cases of small dinosaurs which are correct on morphological grounds. The main distinction between dinosaurs and other reptiles is in the limbs being vertical and quite directly under the body.

[Getting A Life]

`I also recommend creationists read "The Greatest Show On Earth" by Richard Dawkins. Packed full of evidence for evolution.

 

We have a living dinosaur here in New Zealand - Tuatara - so if your 'perfect God' was just practising (perfection needs practise?) he forgot to clean up after himself.

[Qfwfq]

Remember He's been getting old and absent-minded, you expect him to remember that God-forsaken hunk o'ground in the midst of the Pacific? :hihi:

 

I don't see the point of getting into yet another darn religion vs. science quarrel. :) God has been practicing away since the first cells and still hasn't made perfect yet, look what a mess the human race is! Sure practice makes perfect, they say, but it's gonna take a while yet...:phones:

[stereologist]

I hope I'm not opening a sore wound by pointing out that dinosaur carcasses are not the source of fossil fuels.

[stereologist]

The fossils of small elephants or related species have been found on a number of islands. Big eaters need big resources and die off if that is not available. If smaller versions can evolve from a species, then it can happen.

 

Evolution is not heading for a goal. Animals do not become larger to use a resource. That is LaMarckian as in the suggestion that the giraffe's neck is longer so that it can feed on the crowns of trees. So dinosaurs do not increase in size to increase the size of a 'fermentation tank'. Rather, a larger fermentation tank gives an advantage and that advantage survives.

 

Large size isn't always good. Large dinosaur fossils show stress fractures in the foot bones.