From: rh@smds.com (Richard Harter)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Holden and superhumongoreallybigosaur weights (with small GIF image)
Date: 16 Aug 92 02:31:13 GMT
Reply-To: rh@ishmael.UUCP (Richard Harter)
Organization: Software Maintenance & Development Systems, Inc.

In article <713851646@sheol.UUCP> throopw@sheol.UUCP (Wayne Throop) writes:


>and in the older "Successful Dragons", McGowan also mentions:
>
>    It has often been argued that the sauropods must have spent all
>    their time eating in order to obtain sufficient energy to maintain
>    their enourmous bodies, but this argument is without a sound
>    foundation.  It is true that elephants consume large quantities
>    of food, but it much be emphasized that mammals have high metabolic
>    rates and the same cannot be assumed for sauropods.

>My advice to Ted is, he should himself read McGowan a bit more
>carefully, and perhaps he won't make so many errors next time.

I don't have either McGowan or Bakker immediately at hand, but both
authors go into the food consumption rate issue extensively.   Both,
as I recall, specifically address the point that Elephants are relatively
inefficient in extracting energy from food.  It takes a lot of work
to digest green vegetation.  The herbivore must mechanically reduce
its food and break down the cellulose.  There are three major strategies
for mechanical reduction.  You can a really magnificent set of teeth --
the duck billed dinosaurs had several thousand teeth with all sorts
of specialized grinder.  You can have a gizzard and gizzard stones,
which Bakker claims is the how the Sauropods did it.  Or you can have
a chemical reduction and rechew system, e.g. cows chewing their cud
or rabbits... Never mind.  

Elephants don't use any of these strategies; their mechanical reduction
efficiency is low.

As far as I know [and I welcome correction on this point] no multicellular
animal directly reduces cellulose; those animals that consume cellulose
rely on cellulose reducing bacteria.  Vertebrates that efficiently break
down cellulose have large guts [fermentation factories, if you will].
Again, Elephants are not particularly efficient in this department either.

In this universe, as distinct from Ted Holden's universe, McGowan does
not assume that elephants are as large as a mammal can be.  Indeed there
have been much larger mammals, e.g. Baluchatherium.  McGowan goes into
the food consumption efficiency issue for just this reason -- if Elephants
spend all their time eating then it would seem that something much larger
would not have enough time to consume the food that it needs.  And the
answer is, very simply, that the larger animals did not consume much
more food than elephants -- they simply utilized it more efficiently.

Bakker and McGowan are on opposite sides of the "hot-blooded dinosaurs"
question; the paragraph that Wayne quotes illustrates this.  My impression
is that both or neither could be right, as far as the sauropods are
concerned.

-------

As far as "Holden's number" is concerned, it reminds me of the old
chestnut of the three men, the hotel, and the bellboy.

For those who aren't familiar with this antique puzzle, it runs like this.
Three men come to a hotel seeking rooms.  Rooms are ten dollars a night;
however there is only one room available, so the three men share it
and each pays the desk clerk ten dollars [this is an old puzzle.]  After
they go to the room the desk clerk decides that the group rate was $25
so he gives $5 to the bellhop and tells the bellhop to refund the money
to the three men.  The bellhop goes up but there is a problem; you can
divide $5 three ways.  The bellhop solves the problem by giving back
$1 to each of three men and keeping $2 for himself.  Now attend.  The
three men have each paid $9 for a room.  That's $27.  The bellhop kept
$2.  That makes $29.  The men paid $30 originally.  What happened to
the extra dollar?

The trick, of course, is that numbers that don't go together are being
combined illegitimately.  It's all a bit of flim-flam.  Holden's number
is much like that missing dollar...
-- 
Richard Harter: SMDS Inc.  Net address: rh@smds.com Phone: 508-369-7398 
US Mail: SMDS Inc., PO Box 555, Concord MA 01742.    Fax: 508-369-8272
In the fields of Hell where the grass grows high
Are the graves of dreams allowed to die.