Wednesday, July 15, 2009

The Return of the Dinosaur Age

If you have been following my posts on the apparent reports on the existence of dawn age reptiles scattered around the globe, you know that my principle conjecture is that all such critters are members of the specific ecological niche formed by swamplands. The moment that your thinking goes there, all the limited data and the actual nature of the animals falls cleanly into place. They all are aquatic in nature yet retain the ability to travel extensively on land. They are also likely most active at night in order to avoid been overheated.

The vegetarians can spend their days browsing underwater and maintaining an ambient unchanging temperature, only rarely emerging to get at choice food. The carnivores simply fetch up against a group of drowsing crocodiles in the dark and seize a likely meal before dragging it underwater to a lair.

I now have a number of compelling eyewitness reports for both the Amazon and the Congo in particular and other similar locales to both support the core conjecture but also to support the conjecture that a wide range of such critters are extant today.

The probability associated with the existence of a whole family of dawn age reptiles is no longer zero, and I can assure you, I never thought that I would write such words. In fact the niche is globally pervasive and the ecology so inimical to human penetration that it is avoided by even primitive hunter gatherers. We always had easier game out on the open plains and in the ocean shallows.

That now brings up another issue. A previous post on the Antarctic ice core, established that every 100,000 years or so we swing by Sirius and get bathed in ultraviolet radiation for a thousand years or so. The effect of this is to essentially melt out a large part of the ice caps and add perhaps another couple of hundred feet of sea level. The temperature will rise several degrees on average and that surplus must migrate north.

Far more importantly huge amounts of water will find its way into the atmosphere introducing enough rain to establish tropical conditions almost to the poles themselves. It also means a massive expansion of Amazon tropical rainforest like conditions far to the north. The Mississippi valley, the Sahara, the Outback, the Middle East will all become saturated swamplands fully able to support their own populations of crocodiles.

Mankind will simply migrate up into the hills to avoid the worst while managing tropical agriculture.

The point that this addresses is that this cycle has been in place for millions of years and nicely explains the world wide extent of these critters, while we live in a world in which their particular niche while not small is also limited to tropics and coastal swamps. It is in fact at its lowest ebb for the moment.

It is noteworthy, that before the Pleistocene nonconformity mankind was principally operating on coastal lowlands and in constant confrontation with crocodiles at the least and a whole range of rather large carnivores. The moment you left those lowlands, it in fact got much worse. The size alone made it no contest to confront a saber tooth, a mega lion, or a cave bear. Entering swamps holding hungry theropods and crocodiles was a non starter. I am certain mankind was able to wring out refugia for their safety but the confrontation would never have let up. Once the crustal shift occurred, those populations were shattered and in extremis everywhere opening up the uplands to human occupation.

Thus the Pleistocene Nonconformity allowed mankind to swap out of coastal lowlands that were assuredly malarial crocodile infested swamps of restricted areal extent for continents of climatically stable uplands. A rather good deal you know?

Since I have made the conjecture that this was all put in place by humanity in the first place, it is an obvious extrapolation that they went the extra mile and hunted out the top predators for us.

If you are reading some of this stuff for the first time, I suggest searching the blog for earlier posts on these topics. We have progressed a long way here and are long past initial skepticism which is a bit unfair to a new reader.

Also, we are piecing together an alternate human history that is vastly more compelling than any present explanations that is drawn from the evidence at hand and telling us where to go look for additional evidence. More critically, it is telling us to look.

After all, just how many explorers have penetrated deep swamps in order to run down large critters? The number is in fact shockingly small. It will be difficult today and was almost impossible in the recent past

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