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Re: Advice and a New Paper
LOL!
I do wonder what a world full of six to eighty ton animals thumping
around would really sound like. I know if one were coming down the
hall, I'd sure hear it! And feel it!
If, in the first place, they _would_ thump.
I've been told that having an elephant step on your foot is like putting
sandbags on it -- it doesn't even hurt.
Have you never seen an elephant walk? Not even on TV? Elephants do not
trample. (Occasionally they kick the ground in order to communicate, but
that doesn't count. They don't walk like that.)
http://www.pitt.edu/~poole/DinosaursProject/lesson5text.htm I
wasn't googling dinosaur earth shook, I was trying to learn how much
big dinosaurs weighed. I really didn't expect to learn that
brontosaurus weighed up to 80,000 pounds, is that an exaggeratino?
1) There is no *Brontosaurus*. Anything you read about *Brontosaurus* is
automatically outdated by at least 30 years. As soon as you read
"*Brontosaurus*", you can click away. Seriously.
Especially since it says this is only the weight of ten full grown
elephants, implying that an adult elephant weighs three or four tons.
This leads me to wonder if it's a mistake.
Why?
I think elepants do weigh over a ton.
Considerably so.
But some dinosaurs were a good deal bigger.
Tyrannosaurus could be up to six tons, and it wasn't the biggest
therapod. (Behind me, four very small therapods are going, HUH?)
TherOOOOOOOOOOOpod.
This is the supposed dope on elephants. "The African elephant can be
distinguished by its larger size and broader ears that drape over its
shoulders. Males, or bulls, may reach 4 m (13 ft) in height and weigh
7000 kg (15,400 lb). Females, or cows, are shorter, averaging 2.8 m
(9 ft) in height, and weigh considerably less, about 3600 kg (7900
lb).Asian elephants are shorter and stockier than their African
relatives, with ears that do not reach their shoulders. The average
Asian bull stands 3 m (10 ft) tall and weighs 2300 kg (5100 lb),
about half the weight of male African elephants. Cows reach an
average height of 2.4 m (7.8 ft) and weigh an average of 3000 kg
(6600 lb)." (http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/21741)
Sounds good.
So I guess an elephant weighs a ton and a half to seven tons.
Where did you get "a ton and a half" from?
According to
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/questions/QnsDinoSpecies.shtml,
Why the vertical gene transfer do you take enchantedlearning.com at all
seriously?!? It's a site for little children made by clueless adults who
know hardly more than the average little child.
brachiosaurus weighed the same. No, not quite. Brachiosaurus
weighed 80,000 TONS. Not 80,000 pounds. Now, I'm really finding
that hard to believe.
As I just wrote: so clueless they don't even notice the most obvious typos.
The 80 t figure comes from a paper from 1969 which used a commercial toy
-- not a scientific reconstruction, but a toy -- and the assumption that
*Brachiosaurus* had the same density as water. (Apparently some small
lizards almost reach that density.) The model was dunked in water to
measure its volume, and the result was scaled up. In reality, that model
is grossly obese and has completely wrong proportions (the feet and the
head are way too big, for instance), and sauropods in general and
"brachiosaurids" in particular were so full of air that modern estimates
of their densities are closer to 0.8 kg/l than to 1 kg/l.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/facts-about-brontosaurus-dinosaur.html
This one says bronchosaurs weighed 24 to 30 tons.
Back in the 1960s, when "*Brontosaurus*" was 1) misinterpreted as a
"camarasaurid" and 2) sauropod masses were estimated using the approach
outlined above, someone calculated it had 30 t. That number is wrong.
*Apatosaurus* was probably closer to 10 to 15 t.
I wonder if maybe the poster meant to say that earth vibrations
aren't sound? Now, I wouldn't make that sharp a distinction.
Surely if you could hear them thumping around, you'd also feel them?
Now, earthquakes seem a bit of an exaggeration, but on the other
hand, there sure were enough violent geological events when dinosaurs
were around, LOL!
Not more than today.
By contrast, "Locomotives weigh anywhere from 120 to 240 tons each,
depending on the size. Mainline units are the heaviest, switcher
units and yard engines are the lightest.
"Rail cars can weigh anywhere from 30 tons (empty) to 140 tons
(loaded) each. Special cars designed to carry extra heavy loads can
weigh well in excess of 200 ton"
(http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061007151346AAWdaRL)
Now, you can hear and FEEL them things coming - and they don't even
walk!
Maybe that's because they don't tread lightly. They roll at enormous
speeds and thus make a little jump at every tiny unevenness of the road
or rails.