Too Big to Walk. Brian J. Ford

      

      

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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      London SE1 9GF

       WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

      Text © Brian J. Ford 2018

      Photographs © Individual copyright holders

      Cover image © Natural History Museum, London/Science Photo Library

      Brian J. Ford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      While every eff ort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers will be glad to rectify any omissions in future editions.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008218935

      Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008218911

      Version: 2019-05-17

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Preface

       Chapter 1: Dinosaurs and the Ancients

       Chapter 2: Emerging from the Shadows

Chapter 3: The Public Eruption

       Chapter 4: Great American Discoveries

       Chapter 5: Drifting Continents

       Chapter 6: Reptile Dysfunction

       Chapter 7: How Microbes Made the World

       Chapter 8: Wading with Dinosaurs

       Chapter 9: Copulating Colossus

       Chapter 10: Truth Will Out

       Chapter 11: The Life and Death of Dinosaurs

       Notes

       Picture Section

       Index

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       Preface

      This is the updated, second edition of a book I didn’t want to publish. For decades I deliberated on the giant dinosaurs, pondering as the palæontologists unveiled their findings, and it was obvious that they were getting dinosaurs wrong. I waited for the truth to dawn, but it didn’t happen. The scientific evidence is now clear – the way dinosaurs are explained is incorrect. So this book has a bold and irreverent aim, for it sets out to demolish our present-day orthodoxies and to create a radical new view of how dinosaurs developed and the way they lived their lives. I am also launching a startling theory which shows how we have misunderstood the Cretaceous period, that great era when the gigantic dinosaurs held sway. Our current understanding is fundamentally misconstrued: the environment was different; the climate was different; the landscape was different. Dinosaurs were different. Everything we know about the age of the dinosaurs is misconceived, and producing this book has been the only way to revolutionize this entire scientific discipline. It has been a colossal undertaking.

      We are going to travel back in time to see how the development of our planet was determined, how fossils were discovered, and how science started to understand evolution and the way the world became the way it is. As we set out on this extraordinary journey, I would like to thank the many dinosaur specialists around the world who have assisted with advice. Truly, I’d like to very much; but I cannot. None of them helped – instead, every dinosaur expert has attacked this new theory whenever it has appeared (or tried to). Those palæontologists around the world are so very antagonistic to every word within, that you may have pebbles thrown at your windows if one of them spies this book in your room. This iconoclastic review has been the target of bitter hostility and the most vitriolic insults, though my inquiries into dinosaurs were never intended to be about controversy, but simply about debating how those massive monsters evolved and how they lived their remarkable lives.

      There is clearly a requirement for a detailed explanation of dinosaur research. As Larry Witham has pointed out: ‘It is bad news to science museums when four in ten Americans believe humans lived with dinosaurs.’1 There is certainly a need for a survey of the whole field, dating back to prehistory, looking at the pioneers and the early discoveries, and following how opinions have changed over the years.

      Why did this study of such colossal creatures capture my attention, since I am a biologist preoccupied by the smallest microscopic living organisms – single cells? Dinosaurs were the largest animals ever, and should be far from my central interests. Yet there is a link between monstrous dinosaurs and microscopic cells. In 1993, Dippy the Diplodocus in the Natural History Museum in London had her tail raised. This long tail