It would be much easier if I could just attach a file.... Here is a little theory I came up with that may have some good discussion.



Ronald J. Raimondi
T-Rex May Not Have Been As Big As We Thought

“My theory examines the possibility that matter expansion or contraction may have an effect on how we should interpret ancient fossils and our existence.”


April 29, 2007



Introduction
Justifying My Discomfort
About seven years ago my wife and I visited the Chicago Museum, which became the starting point for my discomfort with our interpretation of dinosaurs. This is not a discomfort that creates pain or any physical ailment other than maybe some lost sleep due to an over active mind at Two AM. Rather, this is one of those philosophical discomforts that latches on to my psyche every so often and drives me into downward spiral of deep thought and meditation. And yes, I’m the type of person that lets these things dominate my life until I can come to some kind of resolution or at least negotiate with myself that it is really not worth losing sleep over.
How in God’s creation could the Femur bone of the largest animal that ever lived get to be so big? I mean, this thing was enormous, and the shear mass and muscle structure of this animal must have been out of proportion with reality. I can understand the size of an animal growing to such proportions in a weight neutral environment as our great Blue Whales do. However, land animals, ten times the size of our current largest land animal the Elephant?
So there it starts, and my cynicism grows because I start to ask why most of the life on Earth One Hundred Million years ago was much bigger compared to today. The gravitational pull on these behemoths must have been incredible, which would make maneuverability and dexterity of these animals severely compromised. When I read about a Centipede type insect that was bigger than I was, and I could not help question the reality of this information.
Now that I have this thought firmly in my mind and I can’t get rid of it, I do what most good red-blooded American do. I develop an argument or a theory that soothes my discomfort and justifies my intuition as being lucid and sane. And then it just came to me as my wife Holly was trying to snap me out of my deep “Thought World” and move on to the next exhibit.
“My theory does not argue that these creatures could not physically exist. It is my skepticism that is driving me to look at it differently.”

The First Fundamental Property
God only knows why matter expansion was the topic that popped into my head. It was not like I was thinking about this topic in Physics or that it was remotely important to me in any way. I suppose it may have come from a “bar” conversation I had with an old Physics professor years ago about matter expansion. I remember picturing in my mind the concept that I am personally expanding or contracting with all the matter in the Universe. I also was ok with the fact that I am unaware of this expansion or contraction because all of the matter around us proportionally expands or contracts as well. This includes all the measuring instruments used to tell me how big I am at any moment in time.
I use the terms expansion and contraction loosely because they both fit well within my arguments and can be both put through the math. However, I want to pick expansion so that I don’t have to keep writing expand and contract through each point. Whether you believe that matter expands or contracts, you can wait the few “gazillion” years or so for “my” matter to slow, stop, and begin to contract again. “Please wait your turn!”
Did I say, “…slow, stop, and begin…”? It does not take a Rocket Scientist
<No offense to you Propulsion Engineers out there> to determine that I just leaped into the idea that matter does not expand at a constant velocity. And so I must use my first fundamental property to make my logic work.
“My matter at this time is expanding at an accelerated rate, and it is slowly deteriorating over time.”

The Real Important Property
It is at these moments that my intuition really kicks into over-drive, and I allow it to hone in on what I can only describe as “Truth”. I don’t think I can use this term in the conventional sense as some interaction between humans where honesty is involved between them. Rather, it is more universal and less abstract in my mind, and it is almost as if I can almost reach out and touch this “Truth” as a concrete object.
As I was wandering through my little “Thought World” as I described before, I can more accurately describe it as the absence of thought or the “Un-Thought World” where intuition allows me to almost drift towards “Truth”. <Yikes!!> My intuition seems to move me through this Thought World toward “Truth” as if there is a gravitational force of its own drawing me into to a conclusion.
So just before Holly snapped me to and I wiped the drool beginning to drip from my chin, I bumped into one of these Truths, and it has been haunting me ever since. When I came to, I asked my wife, “Hey Holly! What if the density of matter was proportional or related to its rate of expansion?!?! She called me an ***, told me that I was holding up the line, and I haven’t spoken of it since.
So I say again seven years later, “What if the density of any particular matter determines how fast it is expanding at any given point in time?” If I think in terms of observable time for an experiment, I would not be able to detect my body and the objects around it expand from say the size of a pinhead to the size of the basketball in 5 seconds because everything around that object has expended proportionally including the instruments used to measure it.
We may not be able to detect any variation in rate of expansion in our lifetime or maybe even over generations, and it would be hard to keep that experiment running that long anyhow. However, an experiment over the geologic time of a Hundred Million years or so may show some variation. That’s why I am choosing to make this concept another fundamental property based on intuition in order to see what comes out in the end.
“My matter at this time is expanding at a lower rate than matter of higher density.”

These Fundamental Properties Only Matter At This Moment
I can picture the concept of an expanding/contracting cosmos in many ways. One description could have a uniform function like a sine wave, which oscillates between high and low density states of matter. Another example might be a singular event such as the “Big Bang” that initiates with an instantaneous “high-point” velocity that immediately begins to slow, lose density, and gain size.
For my argument, I do not require a reason or an understanding about how it started to determine this outcome. In a cosmic time frame or the time of complete cosmic expansion/contraction, it seems plausible that different interactions between matter density and expansion rates will happen and it will change the physics throughout that moment.
So let’s stay focused on my cosmos and my matter where at this moment, expansion rates are decelerating and matter of higher density is expanding at a greater rate than lower densities. It is irrelevant how it all started, how it will end, or how it will begin again. It is only important for my discussion, to determine what is happening in our current slice of cosmic time. You can similarly argue what will happen at a different time when matter density and expansion/contraction rates interact differently. Again, wait your turn.
“The way I see it, it does not matter whether matter is expanding or contracting, accelerating or decelerating. If there is a relationship with the density of matter, we should look again the way we see things.”

The One Hundred Million Year Experiment
There is only one way that I can run an experiment over the vast period of One Hundred Million Years. I can not study the variation that occurs without being there to log in the information as it happens for the entire experiment. That is not to say that I can not study moments in time that are that old, such as looking at a start through a telescope to observe what has occurred millions of years ago. However, I can not sit at that telescope to observe the variations of that same star over a cosmic slice of time.
What I can do is invent an intuitive experiment that fits into the parameters set by my fundamental properties. After running this experiment and seeing what happens as a result, we can then look around our environment to find examples that follow the results of my experiment. After all, don’t we do this all of the time even if we can observe the complete experiment?
In my experiment, I would like to place two yard sticks next two each other in a safe place and allow them to sit next to each other for One Hundred Million years. Stick number 1 will be comprised of a very dense homogenous material like lead, and stick number 2 will be of a plastic material much less dense than lead. This experiment would then require an observer to sit there over the duration of geologic time and monitor what happens.
Let us also make the observer and the measuring instruments of equal density to the less dense plastic rod for now. Let’s also put a second observer and set of instruments into the mix that have the same density as the Lead stick. I suppose at some other time we could also make the observer and instruments unaffected by expansion, which should show variation in both rods under the structure of my fundamental properties.
As the observer begins the experiment, the time is able to be compressed significantly enough to move through the experiment quickly. After Ten Million years of compressed time, the observer measures both yard sticks and notices that the low density plastic stick remains unchanged and that the Lead stick has an increased length of 8 inches. There is no particular reason for this measurement other than to just use it as an example.
Oddly enough, the high density observer with Lead measuring instruments saw things happening in an opposite way. From this prospective, the Lead yard stick appeared to stay as it was throughout the first Ten Million years. On the other hand, this perspective also measured the plastic yard stick 8 inches shorter than the start.
At year Twenty Million, these two different prospectives measured similar results. However, the difference in length had shrunk to only 4 inches over the same time span. This continued through the following Ten Million year observations, where the difference in measurements got smaller and smaller until the final year of the experiment.
After One Hundred Million years, the low density observer saw the Lead yard stick grow at a decelerated rate by 18 inches or about an increase of 1/2 the original size. This observer also measured the other attributes of the high density yard stick, which he saw other changes. Although the size changed, the overall mass had not. This also meant that density had been reduced over those years.
“Right now I am questioning whether the low density observer sees the Lead stick change to a different and less dense substance such as Gold, or does it stay Lead but less dense?”

Making Myself Feel Better
Well there it is in a nut shell. I’ve written two fundamental properties that may or may not have been proven just so I can run a hypothetical experiment over One Hundred Million years. So you can imagine how difficult it is to win an argument with me since I am willing to go to the extreme of inventing a new universe that supports my Theory.
The irony is that I believe my intuition in this case. It seems to make perfect sense to me the relationship between density and matter expansion. Also, the difficulty in observing this relationship over cosmic time makes this whole concept seem quite nebulas <Not to be confused with the “Crab Nebula”>.
So let’s dig in and prove that dinosaurs were not as big as we think. To do so, we start One Hundred plus One Million years ago, leaving one of those million years to transition that Femur bone into a dense stone structure through the fossilization process. The shape and all of the structure of the bone is completely replaced with heavier elements and essentially turns into a stone replica. At this point, I hope you get where I am going with this.
In order to complete my Theory, I need you to make one more assumption that can not be proven directly. Imagine the same type of animal that left the stone fossil was able to survive intact and normal over the next One Hundred Million Years as the control of the experiment. Imagine also that the higher density bones have been removed because they would out-grow the animal over the extreme time frame.
Under these conditions and the properties outlined earlier, the actual sized animal of lower density that is used as the control would have expanded at a slower rate than the fossilized stone replica over the last One Hundred Million years. If we were to measure the size of the control and the fossil today, we would see a difference between the actual size of the animal and how we interpret the fossil. If we could use the same results as the yard-sticks as an actual measurement, the control animal would be half the size as the projected size that the fossil shows us.
Even though I am only using the fraction ½ as an example, I am much more comfortable with the largest of the dinosaurs being sized down as such. I never had a problem with the small dinosaurs that existed at the time, and it is easy for me to resize a dinosaur that is say 12 inches down to a 6 inch critter like the lizards that run around today. I do not know, nor do I care, if the largest creatures that the fossils project for us really could exist. However, I am skeptical about it, and this argument opens up the possibility that we may have been wrong.
?”

Detailed studies have been done on the bones of large dinosaurs to deterine whether they are able to support their weight. It is one of teh ways they determine how the bones are arranged and how massive the muscle structure would be.

If your theory had any credibility at all, the same expansion would have happened to marine fossils. Ancient whales, aquatic dinosaurs and shark fossils would have them being 100m long or more. This is not the case.

Insects are limited in their size because they breathe through holes in their "skin". We know the Earth had far more oxygen two hundred million years ago allowing huge insects to flourish who if they were suddenly introduced into today's world of low oxygen would die within minutes from suffocation.

Some large dinosaurs we know had two brains to cope with their large size.

If things expanded over time, this would be done by a change in the atomic forces which would cause our sun to go nova since it would no longer be able to hold itself together. Every other star in the universe would blow up too.